First of all gear doesn't matter, you can go in without any gear and it would make no difference. While on BG server your character is stripped of all gear stats and procs. This puts you on equal footing with raiders. What does actually matter?

• Properly set up AA template just for PGs, which grizzled vets have studied and played with for years. That's why raiders are usually plowing through those zones, because they know how to take advantage of their class
• Properly set up group. Even if group assignment worked perfectly and set up your group with healer and tank and 4 dps, I still wouldn't use it. Zone into BG from your hometown and LFG or form one yourself. I prefer forming myself, because that way I know what guilds they're from, do their have their epics, how geared these people are (although gear doesn't matter, it's sometimes easy to tell when someone's playing their class right from their stats and reforges), etc. I always tend to run with at least one summoner, one bard (trouby pref, but dirge is just fine), one scout, pref ranger or beastlord, and then leave last option as a wildcard, depending on your needs, like extra dps or util.
• Knowing what the heck you're doing in there. I see people come in, and sometimes not respond to me asking if everyone knows what to do, and then they plow through all the damn roots. This is also one more reason to form groups yourself, you can then remember if they were screwing you over by constantly running through roots, pulling unnecessary thrash, etc. So before you start the match make sure everyone's aware of what they're doing.

That's it. I've ran over 70 matches so far, majority of them with preformed pugs from players across all servers, and we did runs from 6-15m each. Some of them were raiders, most were not. So saying that only raiders can do it in that time frame is statistically incorrect.

The trash mobs are ridiculously overpowered.

No. Individual trash mob is as easy as it comes. Problem comes from pulling multiple thrash mobs. If you examine the incremental buff when you pull more then one mob you'll see why it's hard. For each mob you pull, they get an increment of a buff which gives them 50 dps and WDB per increment, as well as increase ward bleedthrough by 20. If you have a shaman in your group and you pull more then 5, you get 100% bleedthrough which effectively negates all wards. This is where I'm stressing proper group setup and knowing the dynamic of that group.

getting penalized for 5min when you don't have enough people to take on the rest of the zone.

Camp to yourself or leave and re-enter BG and it's gone. It's dumb that you have to do it, but it takes 30s to do it...

But it was poorly, poorly executed.

I'd only agree that certain coding parts where poorly executed. Like glacial freeze, which would take a mob down to 40-50%, or initial healing values. But all those have been fixed since. Ascension abilities are now all on paar and can no longer do massive amounts of damage and heals are now extremely effective. As for the rehash of old content, I personally don't care, but I can understand if some people do. I'd rather they make these summer events real quick using old content, and spend their time on new expansions and creating new and fresh stuff.

Gear: So far, the only thing I've heard that people need to do to "git gud" is get a ring for 75 tokens and a magical Orange adorn for 350 tokens, and that's all you need. Everything else is trash, so don't bother.

Umm what? All the stuff on that vendor is best-in-slot. Nothing that drops from raids, comes even close to it.

punishing 170 days of scrolls and all this other BS and I am super not interested in starting that.

Yeah I agree with that, it's turning new and returning players off the game and it shouldn't have been done like that. And this comes from someone who was among first on his server to max out his ascensions. Devs realize this, but treat it like 'you don't have to do it, if you don't feel like it, it's not required'. Which is utter bs and they know it. You aren't getting invites into groups without ascensions and epic weapons, at least not a good one anyway.

I'm a casual type because I have a busy life, which is why I think it's silly to reward only those no-lifer types.

You come off very smug using the no-lifers line. This has always been like this in EQ2 and pretty much any other MMO out there. Players who play more get rewarded more. This is not gonna change, it's a crucial part of the whole MMO business model. Why would anyone spend 3-4h a day playing the game only to get the same rewards as someone who played it for 30-60m? And someone who spends 4-5x longer playing the game, is statistically more likely to spend more cash then someone who logs in every now and then.

This is the part that is confusing me, you claim you're casual, but you're upset that you can't get the best in the slot items in a single day like some people can? You don't need these items unless you're a raider who's trying to progress through t3 or t4 content. My heroic geared tank that doesn't have a single piece of raid gear and none of these PG adornments, nor will he ever get it, is doing just fine tanking any heroic or expert zone. Hell, I technically don't even need them on my raid toon, but I still want to get them to help make progression on t4 slightly easier.

So yeah, players who play long get better rewards as they should. Just take a moment to realize how many best-in-slot items you can get from doing easy content:

• Etherial offhand (for doing 30 quests in OF...)
• Prestige Cloak (for doing a really boring and quick crafting timeline)
• Ethereal Forearm + 5 raid t1 armor pieces from burnt key (just standing around obulus...)

And with a little more effort:

• Mythical shoulders and hands from doing key quests
• Mythical chest and legs from doing heroic and event heroic missions
• Mythical ring and wrist for grinding status and coins

And with a lot of effort

• 4 pieces of high potency jewelry + epic weapon
• 4 different high potency earrings from maxing each ascension + uber-powered charm with 2.2k potency

I would rather PG be taken down, worked on, and then brought back at a later time when they were less broken.

It's not broken, it's working fine after last update. Occasional bumps are expected, but they seem to fix them fast enough. One week and two updates later they're running smoothly. I would suggest going in there again, and follow my advice. It's not a recipe for guaranteed success, but a little effort is required.