[WaifuApple]

While I agree progression is too easy, I honestly don't trust a fix to that to be any good. While it is too easy, it's also too dull and boring, and it needs to be made fun before it's made harder. And even still, the people who can get on the most will be the most OP, with that, so people with somewhat busy timetables can't compete... And most of the people already meta at the moment have a lot of free time, so it won't do anything... Which is why I wouldn't appeal for that.

In regards to making villains more powerful, for events, instead of one off characters getting level caps... Instead, it could be possible that in the case of an event, with GM permission, a character could be given "Demonic Translation", if possible, and have it removed from them after the event, so they don't stay OP forever.

That leaves potential for characters that aren't one off to be more powerful for events, while not being able to flaunt that power outside of events.

...there could be so much more suggested, or done, and I'm sure there are better suggestions... But suggesting a new feature to help villains would require a lot more fleshing out, and I don't have the ideas for that.

(I suggest Demonic Translation because it doesn't give you the ability to throw a bunch of stats in whatever stat you choose, so you can't make unused stats way too good. That and soft cap stays the same. Damage reduction... May be worrying, but I haven't seen it in practice on a player before, so I don't know.)

Also, note: With time and effort for me means that you're putting in time and effort beyond anything that would be "fun" as, even with the amount of time spent grinding and finding items to actually be good... There's nothing all that fun about it. Finding items is boring and tedious, since dungeon mobs are laughably easy, and only serve to wear the player down because there's nothing fun about fighting waves and waves of something laughably easy.