Do you assume that the players who play Epic campaigns don't use WotC's heavy masterwork armor, expertise, and/or Epic NAD feat solutions to the problem?
Masterwork armor has always been a part of the game. So I don't assume they don't.
But, one can look for threads older than the PHB2 for the criterion. I don't remember them back then.
Do you assume that the vast majority of campaigns that started when the rules first came out and pre-math fixes were Epic?
No, but if it's Epic when the numbers fall behind than checking at Heroic wouldn't exactly yield useful information, now, would it?
Do you assume that WotC did not know what they were doing when they put the math fixes into the splat books?
Do you assume that they didn't know what they were doing before PHB2 regarding this? That Epic level wasn't playtested at all?
If not, then why would you expect there to be a lot of "my game is broken" threads if the math fix wasn't needed?
You're misrepresenting my position.
Ahem.
Before PHB2 there -was not- a lot of threads saying 'My Game Is Broken I Can't Hit A Thing.' Far from it, the prevailing threads were about how -easy- Epic was.
So, if your evidence points to there not being a problem, then chances are there is probably no problem.
Then the PHB2 comes out and people go 'OH IT MUST BE THERE TO FIX THE BUG' which it -might- be, but the possibility also exists that those feats exist because people like to add numbers on their character sheet.
'But expertise goes up at levels 15 and 25' stop.
It might be that way not because of a 'math fix' but because the other way leads to a math-glut, where the feat goes -too far- along the curve in the positive direction.
But regardless.
Math bug. It only actually 'existed' once PHB2 came out. But it's a -math- bug, which meant if there was a -real- problem, the -problem- would have exposed itself well before then.