Variance in player skill is hurting FFXIV's itemization design.

[Masekase_Hurricane]

Yoshida: If there were specific items that had that boost or an added ability, we would want a situation where that item needs to be hard to obtain by farming or making the drop rate extremely low and that’s not really productive either. In this game we have people of all skill levels. Different players have the freedom to choose which content they want to play and so the development team wants to make it so that no matter how each player plays the game, they can still end up at the same strength and be on an equal playing field. That’s what we keep in mind when deciding the strength of an item. Adding anything special like stats or abilities on weapons is quite dangerous and so we avoid that kind of situation.

Could still make it equal by having the gear come from something like synergy, where anyone could augment new stats onto gear or weapons.