WoW Forever: Idea to implement horizontal progress for gear

I know many of us are concerned with how to implement horizontal progress without having to resort to stat squishes and spiraling numbers.

My preference would be to focus on gear in one of a few ways:

1. Accelerating repair costs. Each time you repair a piece of gear it then requires higher cost to continue to repair it. At some point it will make sense to just abandon the gear to acquire fresh stuff. Sure richer players can keep gear for longer, but at least if they want to it also serves to draw money out of the economy and keep down overall inflation.

2. Gear becomes Ethereal when a new raid comes out, or shortly thereafter. Whatever gear you had from the last tier is no longer repairable and will eventually break. You can still reacquire that gear from the previous raid in the new patch, or progress the next raid, or both. Gives reasons to revisit old raids for key gear and makes the new raid feel valuable.

3. Make secondary stats fall off when a new raid comes out. Primary stats remain but secondary’s stuff drops off, making it effective but encouraging you to do new content.

Any of these options also offer opportunities for big epic quest lines, and/or grinds for those who want to, to craft something to make a piece of gear unbreakable. Like before your weapon breaks you have to go get killing blows on all enemy races in pvp, and on faction leaders, and use it to slay X number of humanoids in a variety of zones across the world. Tons and tons of unique options to add for armor quests as well.

We are all prepared to replace gear anyway with upgrades, why not implement an interesting system to replace gear in a way that doesn’t require actual stat bloat.

Would love to hear some other ideas out there for ways to implement systems that would keep horizontal progression interesting.