I wanna start here with saying that I largely agree with everything you say in your post. But I do want to raise a few points that I think warrant discussion when we talk about the rate of gear acquisition.

When we talk about the "speed" of gear acquisition, I think we need to think about the life-cycle of an ilvl tier. When we say that "getting alt gear is too slow" - who do we mean that it is too slow for. I think we have to be specific about this because realistically when you look at loot acquisition for BiS (for a single job), it's not really THAT slow relative to the content cycle. If we get 6.3 (and potentially the next ultimate) in December or January given a 4 month dev cycle, we likely will not see another raid tier until May at the latest. We got this raid tier on August 22nd, which meant that the gear cycle began on that day (tomestones) and savage loot unlocked the following week.

That comes out to about 9 months for a single ilvl lifespan. 630 ilvl will have been BiS for 9 months by the time we get new ilvl. Somewhere along the way, halfway through that, it will become farmable.

If you have eight to nine months to achieve BiS on multiple jobs, Square obviously is going to say that you have more than enough time to get the gear.

So then that kind of begs the question of: who is it too slow for? And the answer is players like us who want to do the new ultimate on a different job than the one we progged savage on (though by the time that comes out if you've been clearing for a while, you could realistically have two jobs BiS) or re-prog or play with friends on alt jobs after we've already cleared on our main job - or perhaps those of us who end up switching jobs mid-tier for whatever reason.

Changing the speed of gearing may benefit a small group of people far more than it benefits everyone else because the faster you make it, the sooner people will run out of goals to chase and the content lifecycle ends much faster for a lot of people. I suspect how much this impacts people depends on how many people actually play multiple jobs regularly and not just here or there. I'm not sure if that is healthy for the long-term health of the game.

I am also worried that faster gear acquisition will lock people out of PF groups faster. As you mentioned, we already see people setting high ilvls in PF pretty early on for content that doesn't require it, so it's certainly easy to imagine a world where that gets WORSE if gear acquisition is faster.

I DO believe that gearing needs to be improved. I think the tier stays locked for entirely too long. I also think the tomestone cap is a LITTLE too low for a little too long. (eg: if we unlock the tier earlier, we can raise the tomestone cap earlier). I also think there is a lot of waste when it comes to books after a certain point. I've seen some people float the idea of trading down books you don't need anymore and I think that could be a useful feature to play around with.