I'm still grokking the rules in their fullness, but I think the Improved Unarmed Strike feat makes your unarmed strikes scale slightly worse than Daggers. However, since everyone gets specialization in them for free, the flat damage bonus makes up for it.
If you made them operative, you would make them scale worse for all of the other classes, because you lose 1/2 your level of static damage. I love the concept, but I think it's a bit of a problem with the current scaling design.