This won't solve everything, but it might help with gear...

The gear bottleneck is 100% intentional. Great ideas to alleviate it will not happen.

When there is mass complaints they give you alternative ways to ge it. Like fleet shipments. Of course you have to sacrifice something if you want to farm gear this route. That's the devs way of solving it.

But if the devs completely ignore the playerbase the game will go the way of Star Wars Uprising. Yes games with Star Wars licenses can die with poor development teams.