I have to dump hundreds of thousands of gil worth of materia into my armor in order to make it adequate to handle two-star recipes as a GSM. There is almost no other way. And now I have to get un-materiable DL gear for GSM? As a Miner, it's the same. The BIS gear available is pretty good but you have to work at each piece of gear for its quality, whilst DoW/DoM have their initial gear handed to them and only have to kill stuff or sleep through Castrum for the near-BIS gear they can get.