Kurt - nice post, I think the gear stats on pvp sets must be closer together so players don't feel they need to grind to have a fair chance in pvp. I think there needs to be a pvp reset too, not sure how you feel about that - did you read my pvp reset post?
Vehl - nice post but Vehl! AOC hasnt been pre 1.05 for years. And in the gem era we were all gemming up, I was hitting 2k white hits on my guard - there were 100% unkillable BS's with pulsing gems. We were all doing it on Aquilonia. And Gems are attached to gear and thus - we were gear farming to dominate those that don't have it.
You speak about players changing their playstyle and grinding the gear to be competitive - nobody wants to do that. Not 1 person. I bet if you ask all the bori farmers if they enjoyed farming for 3 months to get pvp 10 all of them will say it was sh1t, but they did it so they felt they could compete and have fun.
Some people are willing to grind the gear - some are not.
If you look at the pvp population today you can clearly see that the "don't want to grind" group is larger and instead of changing their playstyle like you suggest. They just fvcking left aoc, and are playing other games.
So in summary: If the game is broken or not fun or flawed (as AOC pvp clearly is). Fix the damn game! The players don't need to change, they wont change, they will just leave to play a pvp game that works.