Is this the road they will continue to take with items?

[Gardes]

The same content doesn't have to be relevant for too long either since that content won't disappear, it's always going to be there for people to do for the experience. People will always aim for the best gear so you could put 5 source of gear at max level with the same iLvL, people would just go get the one that's the best and ignore the rest.

So in the end you either have less content with people who have the best gear for longer or more content with people having the best gear for a shorter amount of time.

Already untrue. The best weapons in the game right now come only from coil now and that is the only choice. One choice. One choice out of three top weapons. Yet people settle for soldiery weapon or novus. A lot of these people are not actively seeking out HA weapons either. Just go out and check random players running around. You will easily find players who are in full soldiery gear when it's known that mix and match are BiS. You'll find lots of players running around in a lot of soldiery gear but no sands upgrade too. Most likely because they do not enjoy hunts enough to participate in that content to get the items needed.

Providing more choices for the same level of weapon and gear with varying ways of acquisition, time spent requirement and skill check requirement will have players picking what fits their play style and cannot be a bad thing. Serious players will try to do everything and pick out the BiS while the less serious players will just pick what's reasonable to them, like what most are already doing. Fears about being ostracized for not having certain bis pieces also seems groundless. I have been in coil2 PFs with near i100+ requirement post 2.3 where getting an i110 weapon is incredibly easy and someone brings an atma weapon as a dps and nobody puts up a fuss. This isn't even about having some minor unique skill mod on your gear either, it's having way way less raw power than the player could have while still meeting the ilvl requirement set by the leader and the party didn't care.