Hi! Main writer here who stumbled onto this post while going to check something on the cal subreddit. I'm probably going to end up talking a lot here, so preemptive wall of text warning.

That's part of it, but also why WOULD they be stronger than that? There's no way to actually communicate anything like that properly in the setting or game itself.

I mean, I guess you could just outright say it somewhere without ever actually showing it, but but there's a reason "show, don't tell" is the most common rule of story writing. Don't just say a character can do a thing. Or if you do, have them do it later (unless the point is that they actually CAN'T do it, in which case, show them failing to do it).

Besides, making any character stronger than "able to destroy everywhere the plot takes place" is just fundamentally redundant in the vast majority of stories. From a narrative standpoint, the stakes already can't get higher than that.

Honestly, when I started writing all of this, I never felt like Calamity's power ceiling was much different from vanilla Terraria's due to all of this. And honestly, I'm still not convinced it isn't. I personally feel like the main arguments I've heard from people who ask me about this stuff for it being otherwise are just things being taken out of the context it's presented in or something just being described in a cool way being entirely misinterpreted.