I really don't understand their approach with the new gearing system. Limiting the RNG to the discipline is a step ahead, true, but still far from being fair or an actual good decision.
That there were too many currencies and that the game should allow people of different activities to reach end-game gear is absolutely understandable, but in the end the RNG itself is a step back and only prevents certain groups from playing the game.
Honestly, one needs to ask the real reason behind this decision making. Is it perhaps because they want to force grind to make the expansion last longer?
Either way, I thought BW was focusing lately in integrating and including all groups in game in order to generate more game activity. Wasn't that the whole speech behind the changes anyway? So what's with this idea of excluding so many people and gating so much content?
You see, instead of simplifying and making things more accessible to people we'll get the exact opposite effect. In order to gear yourself you'll have to grind the command tiers, then grind the RNG of your tier and then start the grind of min/max. That's PER CHARACTER.
On top of that we have that: - People that sub and enjoy to raid on their very precious/rare spare time will not be allowed to play with friends/guild, since they won't be dropping the same tier gear.
You can't rush your friends/guildies anymore in OPS to gear then, which will hurt, BY A LOT, the already rare OPS teams.
Solo PvPers will keep getting PvE gear (bad secondary/tertiary stats) and be forced to either grind through RNG or accept being weaker. In a sense, the same can be said about PvErs that want specific stats.
People will be forced to do content they do not want to.
No matter if you can disintegrate repeated gear or not, it's still a VERY frustrating mechanic with no up-side.
Honestly, if what the DEVs say is true and they want to make things simpler, I propose the following solutions:
Keep the new gearing system but let people trade crates for specific gear pieces directly on the new command UI. Could even make it a little more expensive for specific gear (like 2-3 crates per).
Allow OPS/ranked PvP to reward specific higher tiers of crates directly (e.g. each boss of hard mode ToS rewards one crate of the highest tier, no matter in which tier the person actually is).