And for whatever it’s worth (not much), this bothers me at a philosophical level, because it’s precisely one of the D&D 4e pitfalls that D&D 5e was specifically engineered to avoid.
Early on in character progression, you can’t equip certain rarities of gear until you hit certain levels. Now that the gear levels have been “normalized,” I wonder if some sort of link between character level and gear level … like maybe you can’t advance any given piece of gear higher than character level + X. I haven’t internalized the math enough to know what X should be. Doing this would give you a better sense of your opponent’s actual power level in PvP.
But I don’t know that a change like that would really make much difference. After all, PvP pairings are random, based more on trophies than actual power if I understand correctly. (And if I don’t, I’d like to understand it better.) If the devs are too lazy or uncaring or whatever the right adjective is to work out a PvP pairing algorithm that takes character levels and gear levels into account in a better way than trophies, using character level as a proxy for guessing at gear level doesn’t really get you anywhere once you’re in a match.
At times — okay, many times — I find the randomness of PvP matchmaking and of my own team composition very frustrating. Planning/strategizing to counter the meta is significantly limited by the random draw. I guess the random draw of opponents is just a price we pay for having PvP be real-time two-player. But I sure would like a bit more control over my own team composition. Maybe having two sets of four slots, kind of like Warrior Draft? I dunno. Just an idle thought.