Making any kind of be-all end-all anything in a growing game is not very wise, I don't think anyone will argue against that.
As someone who got into programming by way of designing items for a server... it is pretty disappointing to think that developers would shoot themselves in the foot and stifle their own creativity just because Live did the same.
Items are pretty flexible things. You can do "powerful, irreplaceable, epic" without being stuck with a static item forever. Random, obvious idea: epic weapons exist, but are just shells that get 100% of their stats and procs from epic-only augs. A weapon has a few pre-set augs when you first get it, but new augs can be obtained and swapped in to drastically change what the weapon is and does. With a tiny amount of effort, the weapon's model could depend on the aug in the first slot or some such. A little more effort could probably change a lot more. You could make your server's whole weapons system out of that; balancing the mix-and-match element takes some care (and there would be a lot of ways to do it, depending how flexible you'd want the possibilities to be), but it can be more interesting for players than either static epics or cyclic wholesale replacements of weapons -- trying to find the best combinations, experimenting with different set ups, that kind of thing. (For the really ambitious, perhaps other non-epic weapons could be turned into augs that preserve the most interesting aspects of that weapon.)
But that would be different. Who wants that?
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