I'm new to Magento here and I'm trying to understand why tiered pricing is applied to simple products but not the configurable product that they're associated with. I've done a ton of googling on the topic and I've found a couple of extensions that claim to do what I need done but they're old and it's not clear if they're compatible with Magento 1.8. Also, all of the forum topics I find about this seem to be dated 2008/2009 so I'm not finding anything current on this topic. It's frustrating.
Simply put, how can I apply the tiered prices for simple items to the configurable item that they're associated with?