This kind of goes back to the point I made on the first page, which is that it's fundamentally impossible (or at least, rather difficult) to have both a) really powerful stuff b) less powerful stuff and c) balance in a game, at least in the kind of situations we're talking about (obviously if everyone just takes stuff of the same power then you're fine).

Just throwing out all of that higher-level stuff is a possible solution but in doing so you're effectively giving up on the challenge of Epic-level D&D; you could as easily just not play beyond L9ish.

I think that for the purposes of this sort of a conversation, we need to define Epic such that it does mean punching out Cthulhu, popping over to Sigil for tea, creating your own demiplane, summoning an Elder Evil, etc - otherwise we're just talking about other games, which is entirely not the point of this thread.

You may well want to remove specific problem points, mind, like Shapechange and Time Stop, or limit them in some way (make them require Epic feats or be Epic spells or something). I do like the Incantations thing and have wanted to use it in a game for some time (though, it's remarkably similar to Epic Spellcasting in a lot of ways) so that's certainly an option, though it requires a lot of DM eyeballing.