Brilliant energy has always stuck in my craw, due to the synergy of its expense and its situational nature.
At a +4 enchantment, its extremely expensive. Consider that you could put fire, frost, shocking, and bane on your weapon and be dishing out +5d6+2 against your bane target, and +3d6 against anything else without energy resistance, and probably a good chance of at least +1d6 against anything with energy resistance.
Whereas silly brilliant energy only works if your enemy uses armor or shields. Immediately we have reduced the creature diversity to humanoids, monstrous humanoids, and giants, with a few rare exceptions. But then consider this: by the time you can afford brilliant energy (by purchase or finding as loot) most humanoids are no longer appropriate encounters unless they have class levels (which is almost entirely on the DMs shoulders, and many DMs find NPCs to be a lot of work). Which leaves monstrous humanoids and giants. However, many monstrous humanoids dont actually wear much gear (minotaur and medusa come to mind). Giants are a fairly armor wearing bunch, but again, you could bring a giant bane-frost-fire-shocking weapon to the party and do just as well, if not better.
And lets not even get into brilliant energy's inability to hit undead or constructs.
Mechanically, brilliant energy allows you to hit easier, at least in theory. So does bane, at a fraction of the cost, and that gives you a damage bonus! In the event brilliant energy comes into play, you now have a much large chance of hitting, so the common thought would be to use an attack penalizing ability, such as power attack or combat expertise. Tactically sound, but again, reproduceable with a bane weapon, to a lesser degree. Even then, this is all overshadowed by the fact that the highest AC monsters don't wear armor at all.
Now, in its defense, brilliant energy can be used in some hilarious ways. Watching the three guards on the other side of a closed doorway fall to a fighter with a brilliant energy weapon, blind fight, and whirlwind attack is a game stopping moment of awesome. As is the warforged juggernaut stabbing through its own chest to hit the person behind it.
But again, its very situational, and you are completely right that it gets more "mileage" in a DMs hands rather than a players. How to fix this? Don't really know, here is what I've done.
Brilliant Energy: In regular campaigns, this property is a +2 enhancement. In an Adventure Path, due to a higher number of class leveled NPCs, and thus a higher level of utility, this is a +3 enhancement.
Thats about all I got, but it made things work pretty well, at least now PCs look at it rather than skipping clean over it. Same with selling captured loot, its no longer "vendor trash" in the sense of being mechanically worthless yet still extrememly valuable monetarily.
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As well as the possibility, depending on the DM's interpretation, that a simple Darkness spell negates all damage from the item.
Rather than reduce the cost, why don't we buff up the dwoemer so that it's worth a +4.
I suspect that it's in there so that somebody can play a Jedi. (Or, with a double-bladed sword, Darth Maul.) And a light sabre probably would be worth a +4 enhancement bonus.
So, let it roll against a target's touch armor class and give it the ability to cut through damage reduction like adamantine. And maybe make it weigh less, too...
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Because I dislike introducing new mechanics where an existing one will serve, I've discarded the existing brilliant energy and instead modelled it after the flame blade spell. So it's a touch attack that gets no STR bonus to damage, but deals +1 fire damage per 2 CL (since enhancement is +1 per 4 CL, energy damage bonus is equal to twice the weapon's base enhancement bonus). Instead of adding "pluses" to price, I use the costing for a 2nd level spell: 4,000 gp x CL (where CL = 4 x base enhancement bonus). To get one that deals untyped energy damage, I'd multiply that cost by 4 (on the assumption that with 4 energy types, one would get through).
I apologize if this isnt the correct forum for this post, it is the closest I found.
I did a search for Brilliant Energy posts and most of what I found focuses on players using it against NPCs. My worry is more about DMs using it against players. I build up my Dwarf Fighter, making him the classic Dwarf Tank. I wear the heaviest armor I can find, classic Dwarf style. Now throw Brilliant Energy into the mix, and you can take my AC down to a 13. How does this make sense as a game rule? What ability can I apply to a weapon to negate a Dex based Fighter AC?
Considering the price tag of Brilliant Energy Weapons I'm not sure I really see the problem. They are so expensive that only the highest level NPCs can possibly afford them. That should keep them rare right there. Beyond that if your dealing with CR 18-20 creatures then Brilliant Energy is only one option for a DM that has a fair number of ways of getting past AC at this point. All sorts of touch spells or other such spells (and by extension spell like abilities) at this level that simply don't reference AC are available to the DM, for example.
The other significant issue I see here is that its simply harder to get a dex based fighter type build up to the kinds of ACs that you can do with an Armour based build and its questionable if a dex based fighter is as effective considering how much of his resources are going into trying to get the his dex stat into really high numbers. So its not like the existence of Brilliant Energy Weapons makes Dex based fighters the only viable route - because its very difficult, at this level, to get the Dex based fighter to have an AC that is high enough to actually be effective. When the monsters get +35 to hit its extremely difficult to make a dex based fighter thats going to be able to dodge that simply because the truly high AC builds are designed by by stacking as many different kinds of modifiers onto AC as possible in order to jack the numbers up. Remove the shield bonus and the armour bonus from that equation and you end up not getting that great an AC which means these CR 19 critters will probably hit.
Hence a Dex based fighter build comes with its own very significant flaws (namely its hard to get a truly great AC) to the point were its not really necessary to have a weapon designed specifically to get at dex based fighters since the ceiling for best possible AC with a dex based fighter is significantly lower then the ceiling with an armour based fighter.