So after all the legal mess and crusading and white knighting about the Apple App Store what we got in return is now buy the same product as I did before for the same price in dollars, but I can get 20% of my purchase price back in what is the equivalent of carnival tokens if I use Epic’s proprietary payment system?

Do you wholeheartedly believe that this counts as lowering prices or providing improvements? Are the Vbucks still $8 or no?

You can choose to value company store bucks however you want, but they're worth >$0, which means that yes, Epic lowered prices. (Reasonably, considering they're saving a good chunk of the App Store tax)