You've got a pretty different definition of gear whore from me from all accounts.

Gear whore to me would be a character who hunts gear as a priority over doing other stuff their character should theoretically consider more important. There was a storm warrior this year, and I want to say it was Crenton but it might not have been, who I recall gear hunting this one time with a group of like five. Meanwhile a group of three comparable PK range Scions or Empire or something is running around wreaking major havok. We have this gear-hunting good group who is doing that while the total evilish/enemy characters in their PK range is a much smaller force and is being allowed to do their thing totally unchecked. (To add insult to injury, the dude in question, and it's why he stuck out to me over the rest of the group, is going on and on in grouptalk about how he's going to smoke one of those evils when he sees him and what a #### the evil guy is.)

That, to me, is gear whoring.

On the other end of the spectrum in my mind, we have a guy like Qulenit. If he PKed someone and they had better gear than he had that he could use, he'd definitely take it. If there was good gear in and there was basically nothing cabal-related he could do, he'd probably go get it, but it was clearly way down the priority list. It was something he would do if there weren't really other choices to do something productive rather than just log off. He'd slowly accrue better and sometimes even top-end gear, and since he didn't die a whole lot (at hero, anyway) he tended to have pretty solid gear at any time.

This, to me, is not gear whoring. You can play the role of vow-of-poverty style good, but if all good was meant to be played that way, there certainly wouldn't be high-end good-only gear in the game.