I have this theory currently that at some point a dev sat back and said, "we are not releasing raid content at a fast enough pace to make it last and elite guilds are not feeling special enough, so we need to make it more exclusive". At this point I assume this dev started making the gaps in HIT between raid tiers 100 points.
An unintentional or even intentional affect of this has made hit into gearscore. Originally as Storm legion evolved the obvious difference from Vanilla was that achievements became a requirements when they really were not before. This started late in Vanilla and with Infernal Dawn as they all of a sudden made the gear damn near impossible to get.
People actually use to get laughed off a server for trying to make raids so exclusive by requiring achievements and it was pretty nice. Then came Storm Legion and the idea that they would gate content with heavy rep requirements, massive grinding, and hit. So some dev set the requirements for a tier 1 raid at 400, but the real requirement is 520 + the end boss achievement.
At this point you might go "There has to be some raids not requiring this and to you I would say bullshit". I spend a lot of time in Rift and probably far too much time staring at chat and a obvious fact has arisen. If you miss the achievement when everyone else is getting it in tier 1 then to be honest with you do not even bother playing Rift. Just don't bother because you have been left behind.
You might go "Join a guild scrub". Well guess what everyone is doing that and guild raids for tier 1 content are getting filled and big shocker we are close to the next expansion and on the 3rd tier so who has time to gear up random people joining the game.
I sit here as a guy with probably 5,000 hours played in this game and close to 3,000 spent in this game with cash shop, subscription, and various other random shit and I have never finished any of the tier 1 raids ever since storm legion came out. I constantly finished raids, but ever since Infernal Dawn and this dramatic shift in raid philosophy if you missed the bus then too bad you are left behind.
I am writing this as a warning to anyone wanting to play Rift to set your expectations extremely low. Threads have begun popping up even amung the most loyal on the forums questioning why in the fuck has Trion not nerfed tier 2 content. At some point Trion needs to pull a page from Blizzards book and publically publish the raid achievements so that players and fan site can compile just how many people have finished tier 1, 2, and 3 content.
Example:
http://forums.riftgame.com/game-disc...-question.html
Judging by what I have seen from my massive amount of time wasted in Rift it is pretty clear a large section of this game population has been sitting on tier 1 content and maybe some mini bosses, but no real progression outside of some test guilds. EU is basically dead, the game has devolved into pointless raiding with no real progression, and other parts of the game have turned into ways to milk the playerbase to buy crap from the cash shop...budgie, unicorn, greenscale troves as the best examples.
At this point I am uninstalling Rift for the same reasons that I uninstalled WoW. After what seemed like a peek the devs simply stopped caring and just assumed that the next expansion would sell more copies and that there would be a never ending rise in population. The devs have become so caught up in the elitism that they do not realize that asking for 520 hit in 400 hit tier 1 raids is simply wrong. I could see 420 hit to guarantee you do not have anyone miss but monkey see monkey do right now in Rift and I am done hoping Daglar will lead and take this game back to its former glory.
TLDR: In Rift HIT = Gearscore and the game strongly resembles WoW pre Lich King raid in WotLK community and elitism.