What would I like to see? Or what would I expect to see?
Since those would be 2 massively different things.
As, personally, I'd like to see Materia as a concept expanded on. So it's a little more than just "Oh, this gear can be melded, so just whack on as much of the best stat for you as can fit onto the item without overcapping" and "This stuff can't be melded at all, therefore its worse than lower item level gear because penta-meld is too good"
Really, I'd love to see some interesting materia, that can be slotted into all equipment and will provide an extra layer of progression and character customization. With stuff like proc effects or alternate/powerful stat effects.
Examples would be something like a Tank focused materia for an armour item which gives you a chance when you deal damage to increase the damage of skills with bonus enmity for a set period of time.
Or maybe a DPS might look for a weapon based materia that increases the duration and damage of their DoT effects. Or alternatively, look for a materia that gives their skills a chance to deal bonus damage (Of varying damage type, Magical, Piercing, Slashing, Blunt etc). They might look for an armour based materia that increases the damage of positional bonuses, or maybe one that stacks up bonus damage if they remain standing still for a duration.
Maybe a Healer might look for a weapon focused materia that gives their heals a chance to proc an effect that reduces the reuse time generated from their damaging skills for a set number of casts during a duration (Essentially, Rapid Fire, but only for their offensive skills IF they're using healing skills to proc it)
Stuff like that. With of course, a selection of options for each item and role and the ability to upgrade these materia from rank I up via some means. Be it having some drops in dungeons/raids/trials to let you infuse and upgrade directly, or other means such as Mendacity/Genesis tomestones being usable to let people upgrade eventually without RNG. Not to mention, allowing higher rank materia to drop from higher tier content so people can sell them on the MB and the like.
Outside of this, I've mentioned previously, that I'd kind of like Tanks and Healers to be rebalanced in a way where their goal for progression isn't just focusing purely on getting DPS stats by making their role specific stats more desirable in a way that doesn't make DPS stats and effects useless, nor makes them not still contribute to a parties overall DPS. With potential scaling issues addressed so that spamming DPS isn't 99% of the gameplay for well geared Tanks/Healers and is more of a smaller, but more rewarding, part of their overall playstyle that is achieved through getting better gear and playing well.
As far as getting items... I feel that it's not too far from ideal as is.
It's cool to be able to get good gear from multiple sources, such as Tomestones, Eureka (It being kind of horrible gameplay not withstanding), Raids.
I feel they could go further on this though. Such as allowing Elite Hunts to get a special currency to be used for good gear (So doing weekly B Ranks as well as grouping up for A's and S's can be a method of gearing up in of itself, while the current catch-up gear would still use the standard currency from the normal Hunts and Elite Hunts), allowing crafters to obtain recipe books that contain current tier worthy equipment but would require you to be a really well geared crafter in order to make (I'd imagine something like it being a single book that gives you all the recipes for all the tradeskills to make the stuff for that particular tier, given that each class would only have a small number of recipes each).
Essentially, meaning that no matter where your preference for content is, you can still progress your character in getting better gear, or if you regularly play multiple classes, you can gear multiple classes up at the same time. With of course, current catch-up mechanisms still remaining, so easily afforded lower ilevel stuff and new dungeons with new stuff in and the like.
You're talking about a forum that has a 3000 character limit. Which can be bypassed by simply editing a post. How is something like this a surprise?