Actually, it has been my experience as well that with arbitrary crafting you don't need the epic feat, just the base feat for each type of item. I assumed that was by design: arbitrary crafting does not benefit from the various crafting feats designed to reduce the cost of crafting, but nor does it need the epic feats to produce high level items. BTW, I'm perfectly happy with this arrangement.
Arbitrary crafting ends up not being unbalanced in my experience because the really good items require massive amounts of gold and xp to craft anyway, so you are really only going to be able to create them in high gold, high xp modules, and then only when you have reached pretty high levels. Either way the items created by arbitrary crafting usually end up fitting the context, not destroying it. PNP crafting seems to have been designed on the assumption that the character doing the crafting is part of a party. For solo play, requiring both the base feat and the epic feat for each type of item causes the character to take a huge hit in feats available for other things. Really only a wizard, with all those bonus feats, would be able to pull it off, and even then it would be a little cramping. A wizard, because of his ability to learn new spells, is probably the best bet as a PNP crafter anyway, because some of the spells required for desirable crafting are not necessarily good picks for combat. I guess an archivist would be all right also. Otherwise, most classes can't take much of a shot at PNP crafting without specializing in it to the detriment of combat capability--not a good choice in single player.
What arbitrary crafting does is open up crafting to pretty much any spellcasting class. A player sacrifices a few feats, but not an unreasonable number, and gains the ability to craft magic items of particular types. As the player advances into epic levels, he will tend to have the resources to be able to craft epic items. All of that seems fair to me. If a particular module's balance is too upset by crafting, I don't take crafting feats in that module. In the kind of module where you have to have incredible luck not to die, however, arbitrary crafting often makes the module more playable.
So yes, arbitrary crafting doesn't need the epic feats, but let's keep it that way. The system works well as it is, and the whole idea deviates from PNP anyway, so we shouldn't worry about this additional touch that is non-PNP.
Now, if someone wants to fuss with crafting, it would be nice to see if we can finally get golem crafting into the system. Otherwise, I am content.
