And thus I have to comment....
First off [assuming one got lucky while a free lvl 60 voucher was given, even with warlock pack (SF9 weap, max soul, basic skystealer which will happen in new soulboost too] after finishing story most content (dailies/stg 1) is basically solo content since your gear exceed any requirement. As an example I'd like to pin-point RT,EL,FoE(?) which can be farmed for bonus AP. It is 150 runs one [even with only story gear] will be able to run.
PRO TIP: Be smart and look for 3 other people who are farming the same archievement by advertising via worldchat /f
feel free to enable cross faction chat to reach more people, since majority is in Crimson and this might impact your experience just as well
Now which will bee faster? Solo or as a group? I came to realize most people [even many advanced] are afraid to lead a party. Just go from here and pick out people to run with and befriend them to grind on later 😉 I have a million reasons why this will fail and yet I have a bunch of people that are active when I am to run dungeons and get some gear done.
Further it might "seem" hard to catch up and most a dvanced will tell you soul boost made it easy - almost too easy. Rightfully so. At certain point dungeon knowledge is crucialy yet avoidable [by this I mean items drop too early]. Might sound counter intuitive yet we had 24man raids where we got only 1 drop which by chance would fit nobody of the alliance. And raids conclude an entry restriction.
By that it is easy to miss your point that gearing is slow and you cant join esteemed groups.
At the very same it's branded in an advanced players head, that gearing used to be hard.
Does this conflict? Will always be.
Skipping some parts hence the discussion has covered almost all points I could think of right now. And still we really have to blame NC Soft for this. Maybe Green Storm has some more intell when it will continue.
We have [had] a solution already. Unity!
We would need to grind all dungeons to get a fair amount of unity points. Even if it would be really any dungeon, it was rewarding to "help out". And I don't view this lightly as being one who got punished before for being too helpful (which again is a community problem - luckily not in this game). Sadly the idea of unity died with level 210. Bonus stats per level might be a little much, but this would've been a community driven archievement to head for.
Still this wouldn't help out the advanced to advance further, and by this opening the gap.
Anything which would endorse the advanced to help, could backfire, since the game won't know who would benefit. Another example are the repeating events (candy cloud): We can't finish this fast, because the dungeon demands to kill in a pattern. To appeal to advanced people they have more HP (probably) and wouldn't be finished faster even with BiS gear. To oneclap one would need like whale status and these esteemed groups only run in their enviroment.
So which is more appealing then? Having to use all of the aggrotimer hence mechs might not be covered OR doing so but having a chance for good rewards? Kinda mean - I know.
Anything what would benefit every recent created character will always benefit advanced people. One could even argue soul boost sucks since gear/psyches in it are lame. And yet many people are using soulboost to create a secondary character. Try recruiting and recalling names of people who helped out alot even though they might even had worse gear than you do.
NOTE: I didn't get that particular impression of you, yet I feel the need to clear up one point here.
Advanced people don't give free carries. They do! Just not as often. Spectral Shrine for example has many helping hand, since new characters can't steel loot. And as harsh it may sound, we as a community see those people quite fairly fast enough. Imagine now runs are slowed (not because demage is low) since people unaware or deliberate to sabotago fail mechanics? It is frustrating since soul boost rarely lets you see if a person actually played their class or this game before. At the end of the day we only have had 24 hours. And waiting for a random invite might take a while. Take the iniative and recruite yourself.
NOT SO FUN FACT: I even always ended up getting carried weeklies [a relic of many moons ago] by whales just because I made a party. I did provide a buff and knew any mechs, so the run wasn't slowed. People just lazy and usually would rather join than create a run.
Over all: Yeah, little disheartening we have a limited set of dungeons to choose from and with demonsbane its mostly only those.