Rare drops are nice but most of the META equipment you can buy inexpensively through the event shops for points or the player shops for like 1000 N-Meseta. In fact if I'm correct they literally give you a full set of really good weapons all of the Renaissa series. At grind +50 they can carry you...
It's an acquired taste. I've been playing it since the JP beta. When they finally opened a server we in the US could access I dropped all my JP accounts and I've been playing since day one of Global. I enjoy the game. It takes what made PSU, PS-Zero and the PSP games good and then adds in stuff...
I played PSO v1 on DC and NGL I did not take to it right away. v2 things got better but I never went online for very long. GC things started to really take off and my partner and I both had memberships, our own copies of Ep1+2 and a Gamecube each with broadband adapters. We had a blast. I played...