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It turns out I was missing a crucial aspect of how D&D3E experience works: the amount of experience you get is reduced if you are fighting monsters of a lower "level" than you. (Monster's levels are called "challenge ratings" or CRs, but still.) This is why the experience system isn't completely crazy for having abandoned exponential rampup; they've embedded it into the XP adjustment, instead.
The experience comparison is based on your party's average level, so one interesting consequence is that lower level characters in your party will still tend to gain levels at the same rate as higher level characters (within a factor of 2 or so). Under the old system, a lower level character traveling with a high level character gain nearly all of the levels of the high level character before the high level character advanced. (I didn't say that clearly, but think of it this way: if it takes twice as much experience to reach the next level as it did to reach all previous levels combined, then a character starting at level 0 will reach all of those previous levels before you reach the next level. Anyway.)
I realized this XP adjustment was happening near the end of Chapter 2; my level 14 monk was fighting all of these Dire Boars, and getting like 5 XP for it. And I was certain that I had been getting more XP for them earlier on.
It turns out the Neverwinter Nights manual does explain this, but I'd missed it. 9:55:03 PM () 
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