I'm wondering what purpose it serves to offer low level gear as Company rewards when most players can simply purchase high level gear and coast with it for the rest of the game. It's never been made clear what reasons there might be to use equipment within your job's rank. Maybe they degrade faster, sure, but that hasn't been an issue for me so far and I've been wearing iron gear since level twenty.

So, my question is, what does the future hold for our gear? Will they ever be rank restricted, rather than rank suggested? Was gear ever meant to be something we upgraded slowly, over time, or something we could skip to the end of if we had that luxury?