Well unfortunately there's not much information since the patch is so new. The best theory I've heard as far as all the PTY is concerned is that Dragoon's tend to have some MP-based abilities, so this could be a prelude to jobs being released.

As far as gear, there are several options available. There are Haubergeons (Mythril, Cobalt) and Scale Mail (Tortoiseshell, etc.) for body pieces. There are some new pants/legs to be had, and some of the "dated" gear can be replaced with the same item but made with new recipes.

As far as dated gear goes, yea the stats suck, but I think the way they will remove all of this from the game is through the Spiritbond system.