Can I say that once again, this mentality seems to come from a very WoW-centric playstyle? Only in World of Warcraft or its clones do you have to rush up to the max level and earn a ton of good gear just so you can qualify to run with a particular crowd.

City of Heroes is the other way around. The end game content is negligable, aside from badge-hunting, PvP and recipie snaring, your 50's are really only good for helping other heroes progress. And with the sidekick system, level doesn't really matter for people to play together.

Neither way is perfect - if they were, the game would be fun all the way through and then some. You'd want to play the beginning as much as the end. But still, I think this whole abstraction of levelling and linear progression through these games is really going to start showing their seams as players want more dynamic content.

Could you imagine an MMO where your level doesn't matter nearly as much as what you've experienced?

I have a concept: What if your character was proficient only at zones you took time to conquer? What if you fought all the creatures in the Alpha Caves such that they became easy, but someone over in Beta Forest would have a problem with them, due to some mechanic of unfamiliarity? Seasoned characters wouldn't be high in level, but rather versed in the whole virtual world.

Bah. Even that sounds like a grind. Carry on, I have no solutions.