There needs to be more "well for Weathered you can also go this route for this other gear, it won't be as easy to get, but it's different gear and it's still available to you outside of Soldiery" or something else that gives us more choices. Like for the Aetherial gear, best stuff you can find before 50 will be Aetherial. But once you hit 50 it gets completely phased out, could there be a chance to get level 70 Aetherial gear that's superior to Darklight but rarer? Very possible.
Yeah, my biggest gripe with 2.2 is that two separate gear streams are locked behind coil2. Granted this is probably a symptom of CT being late to release, but basically coil raiders in this patch have been given a great big cake, eaten it, and have then been given another great big cake. Enjoy getting fat I guess? I think this will change in 2.3 but it doesn't fix the fact that it's pretty awful design right at the moment.

About the pink gear, that's a very good point, for example why don't we have another couple of tiers of Treasure chests? Let's say they're set as one and 2 star gathering items, and provide a decent challenge to lvl 50 groups (i.e. much harder than current chests). Realistically they'd need to drop i80+ for anyone to care about them, but it would:
- Provide open world, sociable content
- Provide an alternative to Solidery grind

Several tiers of gear could be in the drop tables, and for each tier they'd be progressively rarer.