For the most part, the most excited I’ve been over gear was in shadowlands crafting all the different legendaries I thought would be interesting. Then when I could use two legendaries finding all the combinations I thought were interesting / being able to play more covenants in certain content. Which is somewhat of the same case with the dragonflight crafting system.
Aside from trinkets and the odd weapon I find a complete lack of interest and find it actually holds me back from playing the game each patch. Creeping up 5% haste each week feels terrible for some classes, especially in pvp where its like the mental math of the flow of combat shifts so minorly that theres no real consistency until the final months, and by then theres such a barrier for entry to reroll that if you finally realize a class is somewhat fun to play you have a huge grind just to enjoy the end of the season with a class that flows properly.
Pve is a whole other story, if your guild cares about progression its a collective process and gear doesn’t really matter to anybody you know you’re farming the raid for months after clearing it the first month, transmog is not a worry, being bis is not a worry. Even trinkets are incredibly boring, ever since they started pulling pve trinkets out of pvp I’ve found the general design of them to go downhill. Maybe its because there are so many of them and it no longer feels special when you get the one that tier that actually has a neat effect. There are how many tank trinkets to choose from this patch that are a non warrior version of ignore pain? Meanwhile hunger of the pack has gone the way of the dodo and we’re all stuck running double effect trinkets. Fingers crossed there are 5 different versions of ashkandur next patch.