Most advice I've seen on cabbies recommends going full matter from lvl 1, with 3 in spirit. In light of the pet recycle changes, would it now be better to spec spirit and subspec into matter while leveling?

I highly doubt it.

Spirit spec is useless atm.

Debuffs are not working as intended and pets are not implemented save for their skin plus buffs don't work on them.

Pet speed buff is bugged too.

The only thing working in the whole line is aoe snare.

i got spirit 46 and i can say: well its ok ...pet-buffs do farily well, if far from how they work on live ...at least I can solo orange keep guards with sapphire pet only using heals and level 9 (or 10?) dmg shield

debuff is not as powerful as it should be, as it only debuffs delve-value and not delve +25% spec-bonus (which would result in xxx (+5%) instead of xxx (-1%) dmg - 6% dmg may sound little, but especially in 1on1s with moc for surviving it can be important...

in grps however the debuff is pretty good, though it would be better if it would debuff the full 62% instead of only 50 - had a grp with body sorc, mind sorc, trispec caba and me (along with others) and it rocked like hell...after debuff targets went down in a few secs

aoe-snare...well, i really hate, that it is on same immunity-timer as root - this makes it really useless in 1on1s and in grp fights i almost never use it, because of the root-immunity and the ae effect breaking mezz as well...40% snare is just not enough to make up for +20s length (1:36(?) compared to 1:13 base line root)...and speccing 48 spirit for the last snare would be a good idea, as one would either miss NS (25% is better then nothing and its awesome for rupting as well) or body-spec, which would result in weaker disease (level 15 spell vs level 24) and less dmg...

i really hope, that pet-dmg is improved soon...the dmg-values from pendragon are really promising and I think a fullbuffed sapphire-simu might even kill an unbuffed tank..along with disease and sprint, spirit cabas might as well skip any other skills then

edit: as for pet-recycling: I really like the "new" calculation...one amber-cycle gives me like 55% mana, which is quite a lot ...though now u cant cycle almost dead pets for full mana, but thats fine...a 40% sapph simu gives enough for a new amber, which then gives enough to keep on casting