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Personally I don't see the attraction in power-training. First, you spend time performing a montonous task, and all you accomplish is taking out a lot of the most interesting parts of character-building (not to mention a good chunk of the game's challenge). For a solo/duo party or iron man game, you need that extra edge, but for a regular playthrough it seems largely unnecessary. A non-power-training bishop should be able to comfortably pursue "three and a half" spellbooks, dumping all their skill points at level-up into 3 spellbooks and just working on the fourth in their spare time; I prefer to skimp on alchemy, as once you manage to work up to 15 alchemy you can use them for some of your potion-mixing to help boost it further, and alchemy is a slow-to-develop book anyway (except for a couple of ocassionally-useful utilities, it's mostly an inferior copy of the wizard spellbook until the very highest levels--levels which bishops take forever to reach due to their high experience requirements). If you need a bishop to cover alchemy, then skip psionics instead--do not skimp on wizardry or divinity for a bishop.
As for specialists: as mentioned, alchemists take a while to really come into their own, although late in the game they're arguably the most powerful specialist caster (but this is quite late and quite arguable, mind you). Mages are great for sheer firepower, and their development is pretty much the reverse of alchemists: they start out with very useful skill bonuses and have a wide range of good attack spells early on (in contrast to all the other casters, except of course bishop), but their highest spell levels are kind of lackluster. I wouldn't recommend a psionic or a priest; psionics are mostly oriented towards offense spells like mages and alchemists, but they run out of spell points very very quickly because their spells aren't spread out very evenly amongst the spell realms, and priests' spellbooks are full of utility spells that are very useful in one certain situation but pretty pointless otherwise. So if you take a psionic or priest, expect them to sit around twiddling their thumbs a lot with nothing to cast.
So, my suggestions:
-Two bishops, both focusing mainly on Wizardry/Divinity/Psionics, plus an alchemist. Wizardry/Divinity/Psionics is about the most diverse combination of 3 spellbooks, and you get a faster-leveling alchemist to cover the high-level-oriented alchemy spellbook.
-A Wizardry/Divinity/Psionics bishop and a Wizardy/Divinity/Alchemy bishop, plus a mage. Huge amounts of firepower early on and plenty of support spells in the bishops, although you're not going to get much use out of alchemy.
-A Wizardry/Divinity/Psionics bishop, plus an alchemist and a mage. Good if you don't like redundant classes, and easier to fill up without needing so many spellbooks as the other two, but lacking a lot of backup utilities; you might want to take along a Lord/Valkyrie with this spellcaster section so you have some backup on divinity spells.
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