I looked at the numbers for Bio Armor and also spit out some soda. It looked stronger in most situations than any other defensive set while also providing damage and -Regen powers. I would have been seriously surprised if they went live with the set without lowering the numbers somewhere (maybe a lower level of Regen).
Part of the problem is that many people seemed to have a very negative view on absorption. People's perceptions of absorption mechanics were completely disconnected from what the mathematics said, but most CoH players tended to distrust math (of course, part of the problem there was that many players' posted math was highly questionable, and most observers could not distinguish quality numerical analysis from people just making stuff up, so distrusting posted math wasn't entirely without merit).
Anything that wasn't proportional and temporally invariant - meaning, anything that didn't work like resistance - was something that few players had an intuitive feel for. This affected defense, this affected regen, and this wrecked havok with players' perceptions of the utility of absorption which did not have an easy closed-form mathematical
I know they were thinking of tweaking downward, particularly after I posted those videos, but I think it was going to be a small tweak like Willpower got when it went live. I don't think the devs could even tweak the set down to Willpower levels because doing so would require literally removing whole powers. Part of the problem is that it was tricky to simultaneously cut defense in a way that was meaningful under defensive mode without making some powers so weak they violated the "don't make powers so weak people simply don't take them at all" rule created when Invuln's passives were buffed. I thought of a way to do that, but my suggestion(s) would violate the internal rule of "tweak, don't overhaul" powersets once their design was locked in past internal testing. Dramatic changes had to be completely revetted by internal Q&A, and that wasn't going to happen fast enough.