I liked the horizontal progression DAoC had, they never raised max lvl thus allowing max lvl gear to be relevant for years to come.

To get around the whole BiS nonsense they did a combination of stat caps, and putting so many stats that affected your characters performance it was nearly impossible to cap them all(each class had roughly 15 stats including elemental/physical resists that affected them) And after a few expansions there was so much gear that could fit together to give you stats you wanted that a few people just created calculators to assist with gear builds, instead of relying on BiS since there was no true BiS. Also crafted gear while not as good as most end game drops, was still relevant to most builds.