Bad players are bad players, and good players are good players. How you get there does not matter at all or we wouldn't have bad players today. Plus there's people with alts, or people already familiar with the game that don't want to grind a whole other class...

By lockouts I mean stuff like only being able to gather one map a day, only doing a certain amounts of daily, levequests allowances, raids lockouts... anything with an in game timer that prevents you from accessing that content/rewards again (nodes that pop up only at certain times included). Anything that works against the player playing the game. Ilvl gates help you survive. They are not a problem, they help you.

they HAVE to make it a grind to keep people playing...
It certanly doesn't make me want to keep playing.