I have no idea where this mentality came from where people are so terrified of losing their virtual possessions, but it never used to be this way.

Sure, it sucks... But then it gives you new goals of killing mobs/players to amass gear again, and the cycle continues. That's how its always been and I'm not sure where the entitlement to come back to a full set of gear after every death came from, but it's not how the game is designed to be played. Gear is nice to have, but I've never been entirely gear-driven-- it actually makes me play more conservatively, which isn't as fun for me usually.

I've had ridiculously stacked chars that would kill other players and not even look in the corpses because I knew there were no improvements to be made to my sweet set and on the off-times, I'd sit there and type "EQ" and "who" because I had no gear to run around looking for or anything. Having stacked gear actually makes for a more dull experience than being hungry for gear.

I'm not going to insult you like some of these other guys, but just take a few to cool down and look at it from a less jaded standpoint and you'll see that your reaction is a bit dramatic here... Gear comes and goes, man!