Gear is incredibly important to The Elder Scrolls. It's easily obtainable by killing enemies. In Skyrim, you can craft the best gear in the game with little effort. Scaling also makes gear easier to obtain overtime and quests generally provide powerful weapons. I think one of the aspects BGS has struggled to refine perfectly is how rare and powerful items should be delivered to the player.

Morrowind had a rather decent approach to gear acquisition. You couldn't craft your own armor, like Skyrim, so no building iron daggers over and over to have Dragonbone Armor at the beginning of the game. Gear was largely not scaled, so you would never have a situation where you would come across a highwayman or a common bandit clad in Daedric or Ebony armor. In fact, there were only two sets of Daedric armor in the game. One was worn by a major character while the other was scattered throughout various dungeons in the game.

I find this approach to be more rewarding and everlasting because it not only shows how powerful the gear is, but how valuable it is as well. We also saw this in the shape of legendary weapons and armor, like the Emperor's Mail, Umbra, or Chrysamere. Tribunal even added god-killing swords such as Trueflame and Hopesfire. These really added to the experience, wonder, and awe of the game, and I think using store and lore to provide a history for weapons makes them that much more interesting.

Another game I believe that handled gear progression fairly well was Fable. Whether you needed to have your strength maxed out to claim the sword in the stone. Or you needed 25 silver keys to obtain the king's armor, these were items that could only be obtained certain ways with certain requirements.

I'd like to see that approach return in TES and Fallout. I shouldn't just be able to craft the best gear in the game and certainly enemies shouldn't scale to the point where rare armor becomes common. Armor such as iron and steel should always be accessible and easily obtainable, but glass, dwemer, ebony, and daedric should be rare and hard to find.

An additional layer, that could be combined with the crafting, is the actual quality of the gear, itself. While steel and iron may be common sets, the quality and the craftsmanship can very and you will come across poorly-made gear as well as master-crafted pieces. This would provide more retention and variety by not obsoleting certain metals because they are historically weaker than other sets. Of course, the best and most rare sets will always provide the greatest results. You would be able to make them better in crafting as well, provided you have a high enough skill to improve them.

I think a mixture between Morrowind and Fable would be ideal with some rare armor coming either from finding pieces scattered throughout the world or needing certain skills or talents in order to achieve others.