Of course, the crux will always be that gear is not as much "time gated" as much as "scheduled".
You could count in weeks, but you could also count in ... months. 8 months, the figurative lifespan of any raid tier.
You have three groups of players, passive casuals, active casuals and active raiders. I think it is fairly easy to assume that players are .. 1-3 jobs they like enough to "main". Gearing is not about collecting one source set only but mix and match anything that you can. Passive casuals are wearing something to the mix of dungeon gear and outdated tomestones, active casuals are in crafted gear mixed with current tomestones and active raiders are dressed in mix of current tomestone and raid rewards. Currently the numbers are somewhat like -600, 610-620 and 620-630.

I am a producer. My team cannot make a new savage raid for each patch AND create enough non-savage raid content at the same time. I need to do this even and odd patch shifting.
I know some people are attracted by gear rewards. Thus I cannot de-value the coming up odd number patch by just fulfilling any leftover gearing desire, thus even number patches cannot have easy gearing.
And that is why you cannot gear faster.
I know this is preaching to the choir somewhat, but I wanted to rant it out anyway.
We live in capitalism.