Yup...if they wanted to incentivize wearing rank appropriate gear, then all they had to do was make sure that there was a stat/attribute price to be paid in exchange for greater flexibility. Instead, many high rank gears actually give better stats at the lower ranks than the rank appropriate gear with durability being the only trade off. Seems like fixing this would have been a good first step rather than going straight to Required Rank gear.

This bundled with horrible visibility into how gear affected your stats and attributes (STR ->ACC) made it so that you couldn't determine which gear was better without a log parser.