For those who say their campaigns never really go long enough to reach 20th level, and so never see higher level abilities come into play, what about changing advancement? Instead of leveling up one level at a time, why not increments of 2 or 3? So combine discrete levels into packets of 2 or 3 levels worth. So a campaign that might go 10 levels, everyone advances two levels per "level".
One cool side effect, for those who like multiclassing, you'd get a more "dual class" feel since a PC could rise simultaneously in two classes at once.
Sounds like a band-aid fix more than anything. First, accelerating the levels to reach the higher ones faster just makes the leveling process pointless. Second -- and more importantly here -- it does nothing to address the fact that running high-level adventures (T3 and T4) is much more difficult than the early stuff, due to the way magic trivializes all the types of challenges that we associate with good adventures. It's kind of like the funny comment about why Gandalf didn't just have the giant eagles fly to Mordor in the first place. People like try and come up with all kinds of reasons why (too dangerous, they aren't bound to his will, etc) but it really just comes down to this: there would have been no story.
It all really does still just come down to problem with the spell lists. They were broken back in 1-2e at later levels because Wizards got stupidly powerful, but at least then the game didn't assume (or even encourage) high level play as part of the expected experience. With later editions trying to encourage the full 1-20 experience by virtue of giving non-spellcasters cool new powers later on to keep up, yet often showing zero guidance on how to actually run those later levels, they've painted themselves back into a corner.