AFAIK, Blizz didn't go after scripters. The weak ban waves have been mainly Honorbuddy gold botters and pilots which Blizz sees as taking revenue from them. They actually make money from the kickbotters, fly, lag, and wall hackers, exploiters and other cheats by looking the other way, and making up more excuses/spin. Most importantly, they haven't been full acct. bans, or address/payment method or hardware bans, which if they were serious they could do.
That's the essence of your justification for gear imbalance from rating? Ridiculous, and I've already argued how it's wrong.
I didn't say low participation was because of gear. That's something you just made up. You said, "if people are facing others around their MMR, then there won't be a "significant" difference in gear strength" - but there should not be any difference in gear strength because it's artificial and arbitrary. It simply doesn't belong in PvP. Also the MMR system pits you against much higher and lower MMR teams because of few players in Rated, that in Legion will give an unfair gear advantage or disadvantage. And then there's the que dodgers with top gear who will be stomping the lower ranks even worse than farming for cheap wins has already been.
There's no way to flip this on its head and make it sound good. Legion PvP is a compete and utter mess and will result in more segregation and even less participation. It seems to be the plan by Blizz, in hopes that WoW players will take their PvP to OW or HotS.