You need a mixed.

Horizontal focus with a very slow phase out of gear.

The problem is the core design of ffxiv forces you to only have a strait vertical progression.

At this point the problem is too far gone for SE to fix. They would have to revamp the whole battle system (stat wise) and redo almost all the gear in the game. We are destined to live with a pure vertical progression model. Where every peice of gear is 100% the same as the peice before it except for looks.

There is no difference between an Ilvl 200 and a Ilvl 70 peice in FFXIV. They just scale up how hard the boss hits and how much hp it has to make you have a higher Ilvl. But honestly every single peice of gear if the same. Welcome to Boring gear, welcome to vertical progression. XI had the best gear model in the genre by a large shot, yea classes were not balanced at all but that is a different issue. Even the gear even in FFXIV 1.0 was a hell of a lot better designed stat wise then it is now.