There were so many good sets and interesting weapons from planetary vendors, professions, flashpoints, and missions rewards. Only a handful of them are still available. During this time they also removed many specialized vendors that sold low level orange moddable items, too, like some blasters that only could be bought on DK, or armor sets that were lvl 20, 40 that had unique appearances, why remove so many things that added flavor to the zone?
. They really should add them back into the game somehow. At least add craft them, or another adaptive gear vendor to the fleet .I'm not sure they will though, because doing so would take attention away from the gear available on the CM, and they definitely want players to keep buying and spending CC on that gear instead. Heck it may be possible that's why they removed a lot of cool-looking gear in the first place and replaced it with less attractive MK-2 versions: to force players to rely on the CM to upgrade from the less attractive sets to the better looking CM gear.