I'm not making an argument, just an observation. I'm just kind of stuck here scratching my head wondering why they put so much effort in to designing a wide array of green quest rewards for the thousand or so quests in Northrend, when their life expentacy of being equiped is anywhere from 0 to a few hours, where as a lot of 80 gear can and will last a great while.

I guess it really boils down to gear progression and level progression. At this point, a level cap increase really just seems to be more a formality than anything. All it really means is that when an expansion hits, everyone has to add 50 or so hours to get to the new level cap where the "real game" begins again.

As far as gear is concerned though, the system doesn't break down in to levels. It really goes more along the lines of pre-raid, Tier 1, Tier 2, etc. (or in the case of PvP, Pre-arena, Season 1, Season 2, etc).

So the thing is, you don't really achieve a meaningful gear level until you hit the level cap in the first place. If I were going to make an argument somewhere, it would probably be that the level cap on pre-raid gear should be lowered (a lot of that stuff you have to be 80 to equip), or that pre-80 quests should stop filling my inventory with vendor trash.