1. You can buy gear in the market
2. You can get gear from dungeons. You can do dungeons solo with NPCs (Duty Support / Trust)
3. You get gear upgrades from MSQ, so unless you threw those away you should have the most current one.
4. There's artifact gear, which was explained during MSQ.
5. You can get gear with tomestones.
6. You can progress your crafting/gathering and get 2nd Best in Slot gear. The best weapons and tools are also given out by a grindy quest you can solo.

No, the game is fine, better than WoW or ESO, you just took a long break, forgot how to play and now demand the devs to fix a problem you created for yourself. I suggest you browse GarlandTools or Teamcraft and look up the gear you want, i'm sure an experienced player like yourself can figure out the item levels and drop locations.

Also, the story is not boring, you just skipped through dialog probably and didn't care enought o pay attention. That's fine, actually. If story is not hyper enough for you you can skip it, but don't complain about it being bad when you only have to do it once, unlike WoW.