I don't get this whole..if you don't have gear people wont invite you...

We had some really nice stats in 1.0 on our gear: http://ffxiv.mozk-tabetai.com/

...and that pretty much never happened. Everything was still doable with melded gear and skill. It was always about skill...gear was just a little bonus. ilvl kind of ruined that, I suppose. Ugh. I may be wrong and it could have happened, but personally I never dealt with it, and I cleared tons of content with regular geared people. And anyway, the devs already said they are giving us more unique stats...maybe not THIS unique, but they did say they will slowly introduce us back to our 1.0 stuff, they just want to make sure its balanced properly ^_^