I think if this game wishes to stand by vertical progression, it really needs to adopt the wow model for reward schedules.In wow raiding. The highest tier of raiding provides the best gear and rewards. Then, there is other difficulties of the same raid that reward lower ilvl gear while maintaining a sense of accomplishment for both the midcore and hardcore raiding population.

Then there is lfr and flex mode that still rewards gear, but the ilvl of the gear rewarded is lower than the rewards from the harder modes of raiding. In short, the harder the content you play, the better your gear progression is. However, there is still a sense of progression for every type of play style.

Lets use a mock ilvl of 200 as the basline every player starts at.

In a wow pretend tier (lets use cata as an example):

Heroic raiders get ilvl 215 gear
Normal raiders get ilvl 210 gear
LFR/Non-raiders get ilvl 205 gear.

Once a new raid tier comes out, all the new dungeons can drop a baseline of 215 gear to reset the score board and give players who fell behind a shot at catching up.

In this game we have:

Savage raiders get ilvl 210
Normal raiders get ilvl 210
Non-raiders get ilvl 210
Diadem farmers get BiS ilvl 210

and the next raid tier is not even out. The reset button for the scoreboard was hit way too early. There is no need to catch up now when there is no content to catch up for. I can see SE making catch up mechanics in 3.2, but right now alex savage is still the raiding tier we have and there was no need to proliferate the game with easy access gear ruining the reward schedule.