It's possible to balance this with proper game design. Look at Guild Wars 1 for example. Most of the content comes in small 0.5-1h pieces in form of missions, so a casual player can advance at his own pace. The "power" of gear quickly evens out, and what remains afterwards is gathering better looking weapons/armor (even though their stats are identical to the cheap weapons/armor). Even then, a casual player can just focus on getting and using the items that look cool to him, while a hardcore player can work on getting all the possible cool items, just in case or to use as achievements to show off.