How have you handled Epic Spell creation in your games Paradox?? the current system is full of suck and fail and it's retarted hard to duplicate 9th level spells via said method.
I actually had a dual system in my setting, since I ported my old "10th level spells" from 2nd Edition into 3rd as Ultramagic (among other things, one has to learn individual Ultraspells as feats, and every last one deals ability damage to the caster as part of the casting in addition to carrying an often-hefty XP casting cost). We used Ultraspells, and also Epic spells- though since the Ultraspells weren't really designed around a quantified system the way Epic spells were, the Epic system got used a lot more often as we got way up in the divine levels.
For a base, with the Epic spell system, we used the
FeanMerc Epic Spell System, which adds a few extra factors such as removal of saving throws and allowing material components and foci, and more importantly allows the use of existing spells as spell
seeds so you're not limited to using the generic (and sometimes badly designed) seeds from the original Epic spell system. We used this one extensively, and also threw in a variant I picked up from reading Sepulchrave's Story Hour here on the ENWorld boards.
Sepulchrave had a game that was going up into high Epic territory, though his characters never reached godhood from what I saw- but one variant he used that I really liked, was that an Epic spell maker can (by stacking enough mitigating factors) reduce the Epic spell's DC to 0- and in that case is allowed to create the spell instantaneously, on the spur of the moment, for no (research) cost in gold or XP. Part of the impetus behind this variant in his game, I think, was the fact that one of his PCs was a NG Druid with the Vow of Poverty feat, who therefore couldn't keep money for researching Epic spells the usual way. Nobody in my games used that feat, but my PCs still created several insta-spells with DC 0, even back before any of them ascended. They most commonly did this by using powerful personal artifacts as material foci, and stacking on a lot of XP and caster-takes-damage costs, but one can do some cool things even without using those.
It's worth commenting on one more aspect of Epic spells. As they got way up there in divine levels, of course, damage became less and less threatening to them, so they tended to use that one more and more- one of the characters who eventually became half of Evolution created a DC-0 Epic Psionic Power he called "Ultraf*ckomnicognition" (I burst out laughing the first time I saw that name and gave him a "really entertain the DM" XP award for coming up with it) which basically works just like
Hypercognition except for granting a much higher bonus on the check. This power dealt over 1000 dice of damage to him with each manifestation. Since by this time, he had hit points in the five-digit range, this was considered a trivial cost by him, and he often used this Epic power several times at a stretch to work things out during each of the party's "learn everything we can about the enemy before we fight it so we can take it apart methodically when we actually get around to acting" episodes.