[Detective100]

the austerity around sig approvals and item stat allocation is mainly coming from a place of trying to curtail run-away and ridiculous items/sigs which may not have have a beneficial impact on story-telling.

There is an issue with that statement, given that per your own claim there had been an inflation of item stats.
Those so called 'item inflated' still exist, and once a group has amassed enough of them? If you try being stringent now about items, you end up doing the reverse by impacting the story in favor of the group that has collected prior strong items.