The gear treadmill isn't totally the problem I feel, every mmo has gear that you'll need to grind out to perform better, the problem really lies within the lack of "different" gear.

Basically every job in this game will be the same gear wise save for relic weapons and how people want to spec them, maybe accessories to with materia but that's it. It's very bland as you'll know that once you get all the "best gear" that someone else on the same job as you will have the same set of gear with no difference.

FFXI had the option of having so many choices for gear, certain gear enhanced abilities or shortened cooldowns, raised your elemental defense more, increased your attack speed, increased the number of hits you could put out, ect ect. This way players could build around certain endgame content or for any other thing that they'd want to do, it added interesting variety because players would have varying gear setups even after you had gotten a good amount of endgame gear, and there was plenty of that to go around as well, not just "Oh this 1 set is the best at the moment till the next patch of ilvlxxx gear."

I'd be much happier if instead of adding a higher gear level items SE added same gear level items with different stats that maybe enhanced different abilities or any other thing instead of just slapping on an extra +xx amount of str/vit/dex/int blah blah blah.