Is there a "Class Power Creep", and can it be avoided?

General
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Reading the recent posts about OP builds, and wether they need nerfing or not, I have been diving back into some memories…

I started playing in 2021.
Soon-ish after, the Druid received a complete shake-up.
It turned out to have a lot more inter-skills interactions than the older classes, and therefore more fun builds. The forums were soon full of druid builds, many of them considered OP compared to the other classes at the time. Druids were the kings of 0.8.

In 2023, the Runemaster appeared.
It brought a new degree of build complexity, even deeper interactions between skills.
For months, forum and in-game chat kept repeating how much stronger and better this new mastery was. Many posts called it OP, and stated that none of the older masteries could compare. 0.9 belonged to the Runemasters.

2024, and we get two new masteries, Falconer and Warlock.
Both are bringing even more interactions and mechanics. Both are considered stronger than anything seen before. As always, the letters OP are widely used to describe them both. 1.0 is the realm of Falconers and Warlocks.

So, I am wondering:
The team wants, rightfully, any new (or newly refurbished) mastery to be more intricate, more interactive, more fun. That implies always bringing new interactions and deeper mechanics in the mix.
And that also implies that any newly released mastery leaves all the older ones in the dust. They “feel” OP because they have more options, more powers. I am not sure they always are objectively stronger, but they feel this way, because they are more complex and more fun.

At least, this is how every new addition has appeared in recent years.
Can it be avoided, or is it bound to be the pattern forever and ever? If so, is it a good or a bad thing (or none of the above, maybe it is just what it is, live with it)?
I don’t know, just wanted to share my thoughts. What are yours?

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I think the plan was to simply bring warlock and falconer in line with runemaster. And if you fix the overperforming skills accordingly, it will be. And I believe the plan is to the buff older masteries to the same level. They will probably fail a few times, either like now where some builds become OP or the opposite where stuff isn’t buffed enough for fear of repeating it.

So, I feel the answer is: can you avoid power creep? Inevitably no. If you bring new things to the game, they have to give you more than what you had, otherwise you don’t have a reason to interact with it. We clearly see this in PoE. You can try to then adjust game content to the new power creep, or just do like PoE and just make new more challenging content, leaving the previous content as an easy outlet for casuals.

As for classes, you can still balance them around the same power level. They will never be truly balanced because that’s simply not possible. But you can definitely keep them close enough to please most people.
But eventually power creep will settle in, via new uniques, new endgame mechanics/rewards, etc. What matters is how you treat that power creep to rebalance the game. And I have no idea how EHG plans to do that, and I suspect that neither do they.

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My take is that everything so far was not really intended to be the way they gave to us but there was no other option. They are always racing against a deadline and with people demanding the content to be done. I guess Devs only had the time to adjust the new classes the best they could, with no time left to overhaul or to balance old classes.

It is what it is, could be better, maybe, but probably would demand resources that they could not afford.
By better I mean testing more the new classes skills so that they would not be so more stronger than others,
also tuning up old skills and overhauling some classes & skills.