I've seen people argue that you don't need the feats to remain competitive. My own contention is that the gap they address was not much of an issue in the first place, and largely nonexistent at the current point in the system. I don't think anything about this article provides any real counter to either such claim.
Well, I might agree with this previous to the fix to increase monster damage. Now, I don't believe it for a second.
In the last year, practically everyone and his brother in our group is playing a PC that is either an Essentials PC with a +1 to hit boost, and/or playing with a 20 starting primary ability score, and/or taking Expertise, usually at level one. Half of the PCs in our Paragon campaign are Strikers. In our new Heroic campaign , we have 3 strikers, 1 striker|defender hybrid, 1 leader, and 2 controllers. Again, half are strikers. Nobody really wants to play a defender (or at least a straight defender) and half of the group wants to play a striker.
Because Controllers really have very limited control, and every class (shy of a lazy Warlord) except Striker does little damage, and because monsters hit so much harder now, everyone is trying to tweak out every tiny little bit to hit and to damage whenever possible. It's become an arms race of getting the absolute best stuff, not much different than picking the absolute best cards in Magic to ensure your ability to be competitive.
Granted, the DM can lower the difficulty of the challenges, but he can only do this and still challenge the players if the players agree to take their arms race down a notch as well. If not, the game just keeps becoming a contest of bigger, badder, better on each side and Expertise is a major element in that concept at the moment.
If one looks at it objectively, first WotC handed out Expertise, defense feat boosts, and masterwork armor changes to the PCs (AV and PHB2) to balance out the "to hit" math. Then when the game became too easy, the concept (that many players did mention early on) that the monsters did not do enough damage was addressed (MM3), attempting to balance out the "damage" math. This shifted the balance of power back to the monsters. WotC then introduced more surgeless healing / temporary hit points (now that damage actually mattered), simpler and stronger Essentials PCs (not necessarily overall, but with respect to an average attack), and the ability for PCs to use any number of item Daily powers at any time (a major boost in versatility). This shifted the balance of power back to the PCs. WotC then introduced the concept of common, uncommon, and rare magic items in an attempt to shift the balance of power back to the monsters (this was done at the same time as Essentials, but it's pretty obvious that Essentials classes and feats are in many ways stronger and/or more versatile than many core classes and feats, so it looked like an attempt to balance Essentials right out of the box, which was a good thing). Then this year, they handed out Themes which have the potential to increase the versatility of the PCs. Again, power shift towards the PCs.
These changes go beyond just adding more feats, items, and powers to the game system. The to hit math fixes increased relative PC damage and decreased relative monster damage. So, monster damage than got increased (again by looking at the math). The game has been in a fairly constant change of flux at the major design level, not just at the individual game element errata level.
So I don't think we can just look at the to hit math gap as one game element out of sync. There were several out of sync elements, WotC has addressed them over time, and it has resulted in major shifts in many things including what types of roles are found at tables in which ratios. We only have one leader in our Paragon campaign out of 5 to 9 PCs (depending on who shows up) because even in extremely difficult encounters, we really don't need a ton of extra healing (we also only have one leader in heroic out of 7 PCs). The strikers tend to kill the foes quickly, the controllers tend to debuff the NPCs (we have one who gives the NPCs anywhere from -4 to -7 to hit the PCs, so even defender marks/auras become a bit moot), the defenders stand around taking a significant portion of the damage, and the leaders are mostly there as an emergency healing/control stopgap, so many leaders are not needed.
