Well... This was rather surprising. Turns out, I found out why they leveled down so many enemies in TLA. As it turns out, they may have had a good reason. Going at TBS's trendline, you hit that stat cap for attack at around level 55 - for the average generic enemy. This doesn't count special encounters like djinn or bosses or mimics, etc.
To put things into perspective: If we follow the trendlines to a logical conclusion...
A level 99 enemy using TBS' trendline has 2689 attack. 999 is crossed at level 56.
A level 99 enemy using TLA's trendline has 2083 attack. 999 is crossed at level 64.
This doesn't leave much breathing room for bosses, which reach up to 50 TLA (trendline: 691. Dullahan: 676). Keep in mind, the trendline is skewed higher than it should be due to the returning monsters from TBS, which have a clear and distinctly separate trend line despite having a level adjustment.
I kind of... stopped looking at stats and trendlines after that. My purpose was to create a baseline to go with for creating monsters. The expectation was that the trendline would be lower for common enemies, so that common enemies wouldn't average higher than 999. Nope. So much nope. Even the changes made in TLA seem to be adjustments made just to fit things in the game. I've not done the same analysis for DD's stats yet, but the first thing I'm gonna check is that attack power trendline. If it's as I fear - an adjustment to match the intended pacing of the game - then the data may be completely useless for what I'm wanting to use it for.
Pretty interesting research.
Yeah... I was so hung up with TLA leveling up TBS monsters I never stopped and asked why. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out a formula for level correction back to TBS standards. When I finally figured that out, my eyes bulged with the results. Went back and checked things separately, and... wow.
This has actually lead me to look at character stats and rebalancing them. I think HP, ATK, DEF, AGL, and equipment stats are going to be getting a 15% nerf for characters to avoid getting super-high level play from hitting the cap (thus keeping the reward for leveling), and anything I do regarding enemies will just flat out toss vanilla enemy stats out the window. I'm gonna have to completely change the approach to match my design philosophies. It's quite possible that I adopt an approach of having enemies with lower stats, but stronger moves for instance. Ideally, we'd want the same action economy and Hit Count to KO rate as the vanilla games, just using lower numbers, so... that'll take some doing.