Disclaimer: I'm not an Imm, but I used to play one once upon a time.

My problem with the whole gear conundrum isn't that there is no available/decent gear out there. It is that there is a whole world out there that can literally take months or years to explore to find all of the niches that are useful to players. Carrionfields is vast, and it is not intuitive, well-documented, or easy to find all the little tidbits that you need to learn. It can be rewarding and fun though, which is why I think we all are still here.

I had a lot of time for exploration when I was in my failing out of my college years in the 90s. But all those areas I invested my life into are mostly gone or changed so I would need to start all over again. That can be an enormous time commitment for somebody who has a lot of other gaming options (and who also sometimes says he might have ADHD), when there are tons of other games with more immediate gratification at my fingertips.

Anything we can do to retain or empower casual players and give them a little bit more reason to keep playing is a win in my book, even if that means making rarer equipment more accessible without investing hundreds of hours across multiple characters to learn or relearn where everything is.