Originally Posted by
ImmortalPig
Is everything you posted from the manga?
Maybe it's revealed later, but in SAO (for example) stats and mechanics work differently between manga and anime, so for the sake of simplicity maybe she just didn't give him the knife straight away to make it more dramatic.
Haven't read it, inference from what the show reveals. First, when Bell has his little meltdown where he runs off into the dungeon after the pub incident, he still struggles with lowly mobs during the entirety, until his stats get read, then he drastically improves. This is a pretty solid bit of evidence to support order of stat growth.
Second, the knife grows with the user, as stated by Hephaestus, and since the first example shows how stat growth works for the user, the same order of growth applies to the knife.