New guy trying to wrap my head around jobs in this game...

[Estellios]

Up to date level-wise. Make sure your gear is at or very near your level, if you get more than several levels above it and the required/optimal level text greys out, it's time to get new gear. This is especially true for crafting tools. Getting a higher level tool you should see a noticeable difference in the difficulty of items that were giving you a lot of trouble previously.

"Dated" items are items that were made with old recipes before the crafting reform. Their stats are generally not as good as non-dated items and you can't attach materia to them, so you want to try and get non-dated gear as much as possible, but there is nothing wrong with using dated gear.

[Bahn]

"Dated" items are items that were made with old recipes before the crafting reform. Their stats are generally not as good as non-dated items and you can't attach materia to them, so you want to try and get non-dated gear as much as possible, but there is nothing wrong with using dated gear.

I would add a HUGE caveat to your second sentence though. There's a lot of Dated gear that fills "holes" left behind with the reformed non-dated gear. Without dated gear there would be certain level gaps in between levels that you simply cannot fill with the current stuff. I can't think of anything offhand that's great for low level synthers that you can wear on your legs (Dated Cotton Tights, for example). I would personally hang onto the Dated gear and make absolutely sure that you have something else that can fill the role - I don't think necessarily all the reformed gear are that much better than their dated counterparts, and some of them have level/class restrictions that the Dated stuff didn't have.

Hopefully with newer patches they fill in these "holes" and class/level requirement discrepancies with the reformed stuff.