I feel this is more a failure of what is "supposed" to be taking out these creatures being circumvented by the various enhanced blades. Undead/Elementals are supposed to be the time for a healer/celestialist to shine with channeling or healing/evocation. Instead, various blade enhancements get thrown around like crazy, and where a 20 body / 40 armor undead would have sufficed, instead you have to put out a 60 body / 120 armor undead for it to have the same thematic impact, because it's not 1/4th of the field that has something that can go straight to body, but rather 3/4ths. It means that it ends up punishing the few who cannot swing to body, instead of benefiting the few who can.
Like I stated earlier, this is one of the biggest sources of bloat; the need for enemies to have a meaningful presence. Also, to have massively outnumbered NPC combatants feel like they're accomplishing more than just getting up to a frontline and immediately getting destroyed.
Also, take
@Muir 's comment regarding the availability of interesting rituals; because PCs converted bunches o' rituals that didn't exist and got to choose what they wanted, they may have gotten highly concentrated amounts of rituals that they wouldn't have organically accumulated IG. Maybe instead of having a few interesting items on them, plus a magic weapon and maybe rendered armor, they had The Sword Of Blade Stuff, or The Armor That Always Gets Refit in 3 Seconds. Super, super concentrated.
As long as PCs continue to accumulate unchecked power growth, NPC cards will be inflated accordingly. Which leads me to my opinion, controversial as it may be...
Alliance needs to implement a level/MI cap and adjust skill costs towards a level/MI capped syste. People need to be willing to support that, because the cycle of back-and-forth bloat will force people into seeking some kind of power reset.
For example:
The Broken Shards campaign in Oregon is wildly fun, and part of the reason for that is because, honestly, it's free of the decades of power bloat that have accumulated in typical Alliance games. There are players who bring in outside coin from other games, but it's frowned upon. Frankly, it mostly results in some extra production items floating around (backup armor/weapons/shields/potions), from what I see, so it's not even that terrible.
But other forms of "power resets" are a little worse for Alliance, because they mean players are going to other LARPs entirely. They go to LARPs that either have a vicious economy (dystopians), LARPs that are relatively new compared to Alliance and thus just haven't experienced that bloat yet, or simply...don't LARP anymore because LARP is expensive and they don't want to shell out the cash to feel insignificant during a game.
Personally, I feel that with a cap, you can scale fights better. If you can scale fights better, you can make your NPCs feel more meaningful while also not overwhelming your PCs. NPCs who feel like pointless crunchies often don't come back to the game. Your Plot team can feel like they can get a better benchmark of what will be a good fight for PCs while also being a satisfying storytelling experience for themselves.
I think everyone wins. Just my .02.