I'm going to go a little bit wild here with an assumption but I'd wager to say most players do not play with such a mastery of the rules as some of the patrons to these boards. There are players at my university who have been playing for a very long time who still think alertness is a solid first level feat.
That's to a large extent true. In most games I play in, a reasonably well-built low-tier character can compete well b/c we don't go all the way w/ what the top tiers can use and have our own, sometimes subtle, houserules.
But, I think the complaint about really low-level games is valid. Put differently than it has been so far, I'd say that the reason I shy away from them is that low level characters have every incentive
not to be heroic or interesting. B/c I don't enjoy statting up characters all day long, the incentives the game gives me is to stay home, or to be extremely sneaky and exploit things in the game so that the character survives. It's not that there's a challenge, I like that, but it's hard when there's literally a 5+% chance that you will die every round. I play D&D for the stories and characters it elicits, and it's hard to think of a character as a Conan, or an Aragorn or [insert favorite fantasy archetype here] when you can't even take a step w/out possibly being killed. I also think such characters don't have particularly interesting abilities.
P.S.: Alertness is a bad feat. They are in a university, they should be able to do the math. If they don't want to, that's their prerogative, but that hardly makes it a strong case for anything. Its real defect is that it's incredibly uninteresting.