I find myself in profound disagreement with you. If it is not possible to loot any more unlimited items, then the item pool in game will be effectively closed, and any chance of getting anything, to broaden your avatars capabilities, would then be to buy some other avatar out. And that is no fun. Looting items does not simply bring markup or just the possession of such, but also a sense of achievement and ownership. If I can't loot any guns / armors from hunting, any incentive to continue hunting is greatly reduced - I might as well concentrate on mining and crafting then where it is still possible to make such.
I personally am very much encouraged by Oleg and Tigerskin "looting" PoTE sets. I can not kill anywhere as many Evis like they do, but I see a path to where I will be able to, and thus have a chance of acquiring higher end items in future events. Similarily, item drops from beacons and boss mobs help make some sense into doing these.
For the record - the best Item I have looted in game is a Marber Bravo.
Sorry for wall-o-text but I do think a complete explanation of my comment is important.
This is an ancient point of discussion here, of course. I understand your viewpoint, but this is one of the issues where game economy and player wishes are always going to be at odds. For there to be any economy in game, there has to be a sink for loots, and that sink is in the form of manufacturing (minerals, oils, extractors, etc.), coloring (paints), taming (fruits and sweetstuff). When the persons doing those activities have no incentive to do them, the loots that are consumed by them go unbought, and the markup drops to zero (e.g. paints). What provides incentive to manufacturers to buy loots at a markup and make stuff? Why, the possibility of selling the fruits of their labors at a markup (or, of looting a bp/HOF, but this is poor motivation to pay markup if no manufactures sell for markup).
I know this is all obvious, but it illustrates the importance of (L) items. Economists for decades omitted the concept of limits to growth from their theories, and the success or even survival of the major developed world economies has depended on continuous growth. As a result, things don't go so well when people already have all the tennis shoes, TVs and automobiles they want.
Fortunately in the real world, things break and become obsolete. Almost nothing is unlimited. So even if people stop buying
more than they have in previous years, the market continues forward in a cycle of consumption and production.
So what maintains demand for products of manufacture in EU? Again, it has to be either population growth, breakage, or obsolescence. The first would be ideal, but is unsustainable, as we are being forced to address even in the real world where everyone in a population must participate in the market (EU, and using items in EU, are voluntary, so...). The second (breakage and replacement) is the (L) economy, which works fine as long as a huge segment of the participating population is consuming the (L) items. The third is something i've thought may be happening, strategically, lately (obsolescence): making the old weapon and item economy obsolete by introducing a whole new series of better weapons and items. This is a fine approach if buyer confidence isn't important. It's something a company would only get away with once before their customers are unwilling to deposit to buy nice items.
Which takes me back to my comment. Player wish #1 is addressable: MA could increase the average payout without causing harm to the in-game economy. (Whether that would destroy their IRL cashflow and put them out of business is another issue.) Player wish #2 is simply the way things must be for EU to maintain a functional economy. Every MMORPG you see will have players clamoring for uber items, but even in games not based on a RCE, if everyone gets uber items, the game must become boring or up the ante... whereupon there must be new elite items and the whole cycle starts over. If MA were to take that approach (again, obsolescence of a form), it would destroy player confidence in MA AND make gameplay more expensive as mobs get bigger all around.
Kim made a frightening remark in a thread about how he hates (L) and views it only as something for a person to loot and use themselves for a temporary boost above their normal playing level. (If I err in that summary, please let me know). That's a player attitude, not an acceptable viewpoint of a person involved in decision-making about the in-game economy. So maybe Kim isn't actually involved in those decisions, but frankly to have something as disruptive and short-sighted as that come from a developer scares the crap out of me. I don't want to see MA drive EU into the ground completely by trying to cater to the whims of their customers at the expense of the game economy.
So, making a few nice items available through events or extremely rare drops is okay for the near term, and probably worthwhile to keep the player base motivated. Fine, make a few nice items available each year, give us a carrot, but even so, as long as the population base isn't growing, it
is a recipe for erosion of the economy. A more wholesale dropping of nice unlimited items because the players demand it would quickly destroy what's left of the economy.