I'm not sure it is the nastiest foursome possible, but I think it isn't uncommon to have overkill on the villains in 4+ character groups.
I don't see anything wrong in what you are mentioning there (other than clarifying you can't just give a card at the beginning of the scenario, but assuming you were in the same location as Ezren on Kyra's turn that would be fine).
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A typical fight against the main Villian usually went something like:
(Paladin) I swing my Vicious Trident +1 at him. That's 1d8+6 for Strength-Melee, plus 1d8+3 for the Trident, plus I'll discard the Trident for another 1d8+3...then I'll turn over the top card of my deck for another 1d6+3.
(Wizard) I use the Wand of Enervation to drop the Villian by 1d4+4...then I'll Swipe him down by another 3.
(Ranger) I shoot an "arrow" at him for 1d4+4, then I'll recharge this ranged weapon to deal another 1d4.
(Cleric) Have a Blessing for another Strength Die.
(Wizard) A Blessing from me too...(found along the way, or given to me by the Cleric at the start of the scenario)
(Ranger) And a 2-dice Blessing from me...
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If the numbers as you've said there are correct, then you seem to have 'min/max'ed your characters and put all or almost all skill feats in their primary stat as well as all power feats in those specific powers aside from the pre-role ones.
The characters may be just fine dealing with those combats, but how do they fare with other things?
How does Harsk handle still having to discard a ranged weapon instead of being able to recharge it when using a discard power on it? Have you ever been hurt by Seelah still having to put boons on the bottom of the deck when she uses her examine power or have you ever ended up discarding a good spell off the top of her deck to add the 1d6+3?
In my experience combat is the the easy part of the game (especially in bigger parties), so its hard to answer your Question.
At least for me a lot of the difficulty comes from the precombat damage, closing conditions for locations and certain Barriers mostly the Horde ones.
For the specialisation in the primary Skills again bigger parties are making this stategy viable since your characters cover the different Skills already. I expect that to change in S&S when drowning becomes a real possibility.
We used Masterwork Thieves Tools and Find Traps spells to deal with Barriers.
We each took a separate location that we had a shot at closing...then got blessing help at closing time.
Harsk can recharge any type of card to give 1d4+4 to a combat at another location. He recharges his (Snakeskin Tunic, etc.) then discards a Crossbow of some sort for the 1d4 weapon card benefit.
Seelah eventually could recharge both Blessings and Spells when she flipped the top card of her deck.
For both Harsk and Seelah, with Cure Spells from both Seelah and Kyra, plus Kyra's natural heal ability, plus Mokmurian's Club...death by discarding was never really a question. (Ezren could basically auto-recharge any decent card in his deck, so he never really needed any healing help at all...)
One rules clarification that I want to make sure you know (since I wasn't aware of it for a long time, and thus know how easy to miss it is): You can only use masterwork tools on barriers you encounter. You can not use it to defeat a barrier that another character encountered. Also, by Adventures 5 and 6, we were noticing more and more barriers that Masterwork tools just could not handle.
In general, this game probably is a bit on the easy side, but I think you might be putting too much emphasis on your memories of the Villain fights, and not on some of the challenges up until then (note that I only play in 6-player games, so I may not be able to accurately assess 4-player)
By 5 and 6 we'd basically given up on Masterwork Tools. They were still great for Merisiel in a lot of instances, but often it was just more convenient to have a spare blessing around for her rather than keep them in hand. They probably mostly got recharged for her sneak attack power.
Once you get up in the ranks and start finding some synergy things definitely do get easier. Even with our 2 character parties we would sometimes roll like 5d12 on a few important checks per scenario, plus a bunch of smaller dice, plus some modifiers like the Wand of Enervation, Charmed Red Dragon, or Poog. The most challenging parts of the campaign feel like the beginning and the end to me. AP5 has a few hard closing checks, but it wasn't until AP6 that we started feeling the burn, and the beginning (really just until you complete AP1S1 and have 2 skill feats under your belt) you've only got a 50-50 shot of beating an 8 Combat with many characters without a blessing in hand, and you've got less ways to recharge the stuff you did use.
The most challenging parts of the campaign feel like the beginning and the end to me. AP5 has a few hard closing checks, but it wasn't until AP6 that we started feeling the burn, and the beginning (really just until you complete AP1S1 and have 2 skill feats under your belt) you've only got a 50-50 shot of beating an 8 Combat with many characters without a blessing in hand, and you've got less ways to recharge the stuff you did use.
I tend to agree here, that the adventure difficulty really followed something of a bell curve, with the hardest parts on either end. I imagine that's one of the issues that they worked on resolving in S&S, and we'll probably see a more even progression.
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That's interesting. In our 5-man party consisting of Kyra, Seelah, Lini, Harsk, and Lem, we found the AP3S5 to be the most challenging scenario we've had. We lost a few times early on due to the timer running out, but the final adventure of AP3 had three characters about 1-2 cards away from death and had to burn a Consecration and Holy Candle to squeak by. It was rough.