Where does the "ToB is too strong" myth come from?

[H_H_F_F]

One reason I forgot -
If you have a group of players with various levels of mechanical knowledge, and they all go build their characters separately, it's more likely for an op-savvy player to be the one who shows up with a ToB class, because it's more likely they've heard of it and don't find the added complexity (over a Barbarian, say) to be daunting. And unlike a caster, where an optimized and non-optimized one might look the same at first glance, here the more powerful characters come from a whole separate book and have distinctive mechanics.

Same reason Psionics gets seen as OP, I think, where core casting doesn't.

Interesting thought, and a good comparisonvto psionics.

Then again, the same logic could apply to incarnum, and I've never seen anyone make that claim.

Still, probably a part of the answer.