Yes, because it's easy to label others as elitists when they give suggestions to increase performance.
Whether it's reasonable or not it's still completely depending on your POV. If you think NQ is good enough, go for it. If you want best performance, do HQ. I don't see a problem to suggest HQ/more expensive items for those who wants to have better performance. Same for gear swap, if you think your performance is good without gear swap, go ahead, but there are going to be ppl disagree with you and refuse to pt with you, that's just the way it goes. Either accept that fact and don't pt with "elitists" or change the way you play, simple.
Since OP is asking about better gear/gear set, instead of "cheap and effective gear", it's fairly reasonable to list the better gears instead of the subpar ones. Of course if he can't obtain better gears, can just settle with 2nd best 3rd best etc while aiming for the best ones. Sure, it's not the end of the world to settle with gears that's not the best(every player in this game more or less use subpar gear on one of their job anyways), but there's really no need to butthurt when someone else mentioning gear swap and listing hard to obtain gears.