I don't think 'I took this one line in a side-story to mean this extremely specific thing about a 100% unrelated part of the game world that our character themselves would be an exception to, and when bringing it up am told that this idea of mine is completely baseless' is the game's fault.

Yeah, the computer's just doing a 'their power level is insane', coupled with... well, the fact we smashed it; generally speaking that's pretty good evidence that the smash-er exceeds the smash-ee's expected levels of strength, especially when the smash-ee starts the fight. If someone REALLY wanted to big up that line as meaning more, I would instead point to the subject of Rejoinings and soul density: The Allagan Empire reigned after three Calamities, at a time when everyone on the Source had 4/14 of a 'full' unsundered soul. We came at that thing after the seventh Calamity, with 8/14 of a 'full' soul. Our soul is literally twice as beefy as what Allagan technology was designed to expect, is it any wonder that when we came across a piece of Allagan tech designed to scan a soul, we broke its scale?