Its the direction they decided to go with Age of Shadow's... Introducing item properties that combined with powder of fortification, over the years the weapons have piled up the player base shrank and all the regular players have those items now and thats why you see them around so much now. Plus with the duping of the val/verite hammers alot more items were intoduced.
I don't see how its overpowered, your probably just a guy that happens to not have any of these items...
I don't think that having 1/10th the customer base has much to do with the items nowdays, its just that when UO came out it was pretty much the only MMO out and was a bad ass game... then more and more MMO's came out and players moved on to "the next best thing"