Raise your item level to 119 by completing a tutorial quest!

[Catmato]

It was a poorly implemented system in multiple ways, and refusal to raise the item level cap to reflect the increasing power of gear is but one of those ways.
Another would be stat vomit on gear. By stat vomit I mean how everything has loads of STR, DEX, etc, on it. It makes it hard to judge what actually has increased stats over the baseline without a lot of switching back and forth between items to compare them. It also blurs job differences, since you can lump together jobs on a single piece of gear that would have different base stat progressions. A much more elegant way to do it would simply to have item level determine your base statistics, just like normal level does. Then there's no stat vomit, and you can clearly see that this piece of gear his 20 DEX on it, or this piece has 15 Evasion.

Maybe the new director will do the players a favor and eliminate item levels and just let us level up past 99.

[machini]

Maybe the new director will do the players a favor and eliminate item levels and just let us level up past 99.

Unless they make certain JAs, like Composure, not accessible via subjob, like NIN JAs, I don't see that working.

Also bear in mind they would have to go back at this point through ALL item level gear and redo the stat vomit.