The good news is, if you honestly believe you have to camp vendors just to keep up to same level enemies (tip: you don't outside of Tactician at all), you can play four Intelligence based casters. They don't really scale with gear nearly as much as the physical builds and do just fine.
So the 'good news' is that you have to play a specific type of party makeup to even attempt to get away from the item scaling problem? Go white knight for terrible systems somewhere else, nobody's buying your bullshit here.
White Knight? I'm not apologizing for anything in the game. You can be salty, but you don't need to be so hostile because I listed an alternative, and because I mentioned that vendor camping isn't necessary, because it's not.
As for Lucky Charm, I'm not sure it honestly matters either way. It's obviously "luck" based, but all that I ever end up getting with Lucky Charm over a playthrough is sellable trash the majority of the time. So all I get is more gold, when being able to get the items from a vendor I want has never been an issue to begin with.
This. With a high Lucky Charm stat, nearly every container contains at least two Rare+ items. By the time I finished Bloodmoon Island, more than half of my inventory was just unidentified items. Lucky Charm 6+ definitely needs to be nerfed.
Whereas someone like me who doesn't have any points into Lucky Charm is impoverished in terms of loot and is at level 11 wearing gear several levels lower because I haven't found much decent stuff, and can't afford to replace much of it each level.
Impoverished? I guess stealing isn't something you want to lower yourself into doing then? You only need to regear every 2-3 levels (sometimes much later if you're wearing rings and an amulet that have needed or good bonuses for your build, and a socket) until level 17+ and even then it's almost exclusively going to be a weapon for physical classes. You can also simply hold off until you're a bit through an Act before stealing, since it can only be done once with a single character per vendor, or simply respec two non thieving characters and go on a stealing spree, while you save your fourth for when an act is about finished and the vendors that you'll never access again have higher stocked gear and books.
Lucky Charm is obviously going to net you a bit more gold over a playthrough, but enough that you can't still get everything you want without it? I'm just now leaving Act 2 on my current playthrough and sitting at 172K gold on an all physical team, and I've only ever respecced two of my characters to steal aside from my primary thief two times and have never wanted for gear. Levels go by too quickly in Act 2 initially for worrying about upgrades to matter all that much aside from weapons and runes. Currently at 7 Lucky Charm, and I still don't get the "non stop epic chain from containers" that people talk about either. On my previous playthroughs it seemed like I might get an item every 5-10 containers at most and usually it was some blue garbage that didn't sell for much anyway. With my current playthrough, occasionally I'll see a purple within two containers, but that's ultra rare. This was before the patch BTW.
