I don't see how runics cued the decline of UO. I had a character without a weapon skill and ended up having many many runics lying in my house/bank. They weren't really overpowered. Gold was the best people would cart around without blessing it, pretty much, and that isn't much better than a vanq weapon. If there was someone walking around with a val runic, and it wasn't blessed, they'd be ganked in a second. Val weapons don't protect you from being combo'd by 4 people. :/

I don't see how they unbalanced the game at all, nor marked the decline of the game, besides ringing in AoS with it's item based crap.

As long as you have a decent connection it was skill > equipment, even if it was a runic.