The gear lockouts do suck. The main reason they are even there is because they are aped off of other MMO strategies for keeping people playing by making sure they got something to keep running after. Unfortunately the companies that implement the systems don't understand that this is an incredibly fragile way to keep people playing, because it depends on making an illusion of value on something that gets trivialized later. That and once people understand and have felt the pain of how all their effort ultimately is worthless, they usually don't do hard content again except for the sake of doing something more structured than the normal stuff.