Yeah once your purple set is 1370 (+15) you can't upgrade anymore. Here you should get Abyssal Dungeon/Raids stuff which can be upgraded further, so you'd need to do Heroic Punika Abyssal dungeons and/or Argos. Both are pretty much puggable but depending on the group you might not succeed - and it's once per week
And yeah the honing chances are a bit disheartening but nothing surprising here really. That's still a good feeling to get a success on a 5%- honing but overall you're in for chaining fails until the bad luck protection hits.
I've brought my main to 1400something, doing the first Abyssal Dungeon for a few weeks and my first Argos P1 last week, now I don't even really care about trying to upgrade any more, this gear level is enough for 90% of the content a casual player can do, so I'm focusing on alts to see different gameplays.
Thankfully, this game is also great for casual players thanks to the amount of horizontal content that eats up a good amount of time
Let's be honest here - if they had announced 20 new classes and 74 new raids you'd say the same about whatever is "missing". Let it go, it's unhealthy to keep that sort of hatred toward a game you're not playing anymore.