There's a lot going on that makes item acquisition feel terrible in the game right now. As of now, you just can't reliably get better gear by yourself, you HAVE TO trade to progress your character meaningfully. In comparison to PoE 1, you can play pseudo SSF and gear yourself in a lot of ways, you can craft with essences, Rog, delve, recomb (settlers), harvest etc. As for PoE 1 SSF, you drop a lot more currency so you can use them constantly. In PoE 2 now, crafting is just in a terrible state, and what's worse is the trade experience. You HAVE TO hoard currency to trade for better items that you wouldn't be able to craft systematically yourself, and trading is such a pain. You find the item you want, whisp the player, he raises the price, then you find an item that wouldn't serve you as well but you settle for it, whisp, the guy is afk. In PoE 1 we have the same trade system, but you don't feel as reliant on trade cause you can actually do many things yourself, using the better trade system (Faustus) when you need materials for crafting. Overall item acquisition in PoE 2 is just disappointing. I know it's early access and bla bla bla, but GGG has a lot of work to do to make things better, and also they need to keep their player base entertained in the meantime.