Changes to gearing in SL have in general been great for PVP, with the only exception - people who are only doing random BGs got the short end of the stick.
In any content in WoW, the principle holds: when you do the content, you get enough gear from it to continue doing it comfortably.
This holds for M+, raids, rated PVP. Prior to SL, it used to hold for unrated PVP as well. In Cata / MoP you could get conquest gear during the season, this was slow, but possible (you were capping mid-season). In WoD you could do the same thing PLUS honor gear was boosted to the levels where it was competitive with conquest gear already. It was ideal. In Legion, there was scaling. It was unliked because it was trying to be too smart. But at least it worked. In BFA, there was still scaling, still unliked, but still somewhat working, plus you could get conquest gear. Again, slowly, but you could.
In SL, smart scaling is gone (yay), but there is no replacement for it at all. We don’t have the simple scaling of WoD. And while we can earn conquest - as usual, slowly, but we can - we got no use for it. Because upgrades to conquest gear require ratings. And we don’t have ratings. If rated BGs had a solo queue, we’d use that queue, but they don’t have it.
One of the possible solutions would be to reinstate scaling in random BGs and there alone. Either cap all gear in random BGs to ilvl 200 = maximum available from random BGs. Or boost honor gear in random BGs to ilvl 220 and conquest to ilvl 226.
And a simpler solution is to just get rid of rating requirements on conquest gear. We used to have that system already in Cata / MoP and it worked quite well. Here are some tweets from that time from the leading PVP designer which are a testimony to how well that worked:
https://i.imgur.com/1Th9Cds.png
Quoting from there:
Tweet 1: In the US and EU, the number of people doing random battlegrounds is as high or more than LFR.
Tweet 2: likewise as many people do 2s as normal raiding. As many do 3s as heroic raiding. Not a niche.
Both tweets are from the MoP era. Where people doing random BGs were able to slowly get conquest gear and gear up completely mid-season. As you can see, this was working wonders.
Please let us go back to these wonderful times! Remove rating requirements from upgrades to conquest gear. Limit that gear to just PVP if you have to. Nothing else has to change.
Thanks!