The DPS race to the finish becomes a real problem in Act 2 or more when bosses have disgusting damage and armor piercing disables while you have none of that, not to mention gimmicks like the doctor where you either one shot him turn 1 or face the hardest boss in the entire game.
The final boss gimmick is also a DPS race since killing his adds solves nothing and every adds has nearly 20k armor/hp with stupid amount of damage and abilities, essentially forcing you to arrow storm your way to victory. Combined with high scaling of items, when you are level 20 you find your self struggling, a level later you are one shotting everything in the game.
A bow from level 21 to level 22 had 200 damage difference, a near 100% increase.
Insane level scaling is definitely the core of the problem. The dps scales faster than hp scaling in middle of the game (act2/3), then act 4 catchups so quickly it's unbelievable (on Tactician).
My friend and I started deliberately going into the fight with intended level of gears, and let's just say, the fights are very very difficult. Like you said, you have to resort to dps race, I don't know this will be easily fixed unless they hire someone extremely experienced in designing challenges and combat with variety. Arx has been enjoyable with on the level gears, the difficulty though, I can imagine some would even say it's impossible.
If you going into the fight with level 21/22 and optimized everything (Gears mainly with that -ap cost green tea sold by Kemm's wife), fights definitely started becoming too easy just like act2/3.
