Grinding gear levels should not be end game gaming so much as crystal hunting new toons. Releasing new toon(s) or adding a new raid or a new ship mode, or just basically, expanding our rosters to plumb the depths of new content, are the end game.
The gear bottleneck which is stopping us from finishing toons quickly is not a cash grab or some other nefarious plan, it’s simply a symptom of bad planning. The devs are only human and likely did not anticipate the problem because they probably didn’t realize there was one. By the time it was noticeable, it was already too late to do anything without serious character revisions.
Hopefully, in the future we’ll see toons requiring a much more varied selection of gear pieces so we can start using those thousands and thousands of unused salvage. Or maybe an improvement on the drop rates of selected nodes only should be considered. My vote would be some sort of gear exchange.