Quote Originally Posted by slarden View Post

There is no chance Turbine every intended for us to run 500 hours of quests to get a heart through game play which is more time than it takes to cap all epic destines. Producer Glin's twitter feed supports that as does his forum posts. No, I don't think it was ever going to live that way.
If that's the case, why do you think they put such arbitrarily high numbers in there? If they had absolutely no intention of shipping it with high numbers, all they have done is create more ill-will.

Personally I think they put high numbers in for this reason:

If no complaints, leave it as is and ship it. If there are complaints, titrate it down slowly until you get to highest maximum number all while achieving acceptable levels of "pain". Personally that's the wrong way to go about it as well.