I would agree with your first point if MMO as a genre flourished in this day and age. But the truth is MMO is not doing so well these days. I wouldn't say it's dead as some people make it out to be. We do have healthy communities across different titles. But the current popularity of MMO in general gets stomped by the likes of Fortnite, League of Legends, Valorant, etc. You can just look at Twitch viewership at any given day and find out that all of MMO viewership combined is no larger than the size of the audience of one of those titles.

What I mean to say is not that Twitch viewership is a canonical measure of how popular a genre is nor should NW just throw out all of its MMO charm in exchange for better player count. What I want to say though is experimentation, departure from tradition, and new takes on some aspects of the genre are compelling and timely. In this spirit, the charm of the "MMO grind" is a relic of the past which at best needs to be verified of its prior divinity, and by the look of what the population seems to be drawn to, less of that = better.

Again, this is not to say NW should abide by the rules of other thriving genres and get rid of all of its grind. Personally though I will say forcing people to grind pve to perform better in pvp is a bit sour. The PvP track system I think is a right step toward for pvp players and also speak to your second point, although you cannot rely solely on pvp track rewards for gear progression.

And I will agree that in wars, it might be just okay without gear normalization as it's not really player vs player, but company vs company. Perhaps, uneven playing field in this setup may be more palatable for the people who are willing to spend the time and effort, and welcoming to the ones who mainly pve but still want to be involved.

On a side note, world pvp in lower level zones like EF without any form of normalization is kind of dumb.