A trope I successfully subverted in my 13 years campaign was "Magic Items must scale! Encounters must scale! Monsters must scale! Characters must... well... be balanced!"
- In Lord of the Rings over and over "low-level characters" get from weapons that work against The Lord of the Nazguls to the Ring of Power itself. Also, Pippin is not Aragorn. Also, Pippin meets the Balrog.
- Dragonlance, back in the '80s, already subverted this trope by having you start either as a 3rd level magic user with a weak magic item or as a 6th level fighter with a +3 two-handed sword. The 3rd level MU was narratively more impactful than the 6th level fighter.
- In the "Bourne" movies (one of my two sources of inspiration for the campaign - the other was the Iran-Contra scandal...) the main character has superhuman abilities, true. But he starts alone. But he starts with immense resources.
The last stretch of the campaign, the one inspired by Bourne, saw a group of Harpists (in the FR setting) finding themselves in the eye of the storm of a conspiracy involving an unknown number of the "Gods of Good". They started at 5th level but also with 150 million GPs (don't ask, they almost caused a war between Cormyr and Calimshan). First the Harpists tried to kill them, then the paladins of various Gods. They realised that they had uncovered... something, but they didn't know what. Paranoia ran high - especially when some Gods of Good started... dropping dead?! The group used their immense resources to go undercover and avoid... uhm... divine scrying... At the end it all worked very well. Not that I ever doubted it.
Oh, I forgot about it: "Encounters" don't mean "let's put down the miniatures in a very specific way detailed in the scenario!" If you are 1st level and an ancient red dragon is gliding towards you, RUN! Another reason to ditch your 4E books BTW.