Thanks for taking the time to post suggestions and sorry if I won't be 100% clear or complete with my response but it's past 3 am, English isn't my native language and lastly this is a way more complex topic than anything to reply or to discuss in a single post. I'll try to respond your post line by line, the best I can.
First of all, please keep in mind that when we talk about balance or changing things, even 1 bit of a zone, it's basically changing more than a year of hard work of many developers to create a perfectly balanced server, based on hundreds of players feedback. So iIt's never as easy as it looks. (new custom server poping on in eqemu offering 150+ levels and stuff while trying to stay balanced always make me smile
)Creating new gear for solo players is totally unrelated to the latest raid tier. We can offer more time sink type rewards (e.g. ldon items for more points), we can offer rare world boss loot, we can offer lifetime quest rewards and so on. There is no limit at all, and raid progression is totally irrelevant. Tuning down zones would mean one thing, we would lower the time to get to the top tier, and that wont be our intention for many obvious reasons. (I don't want to reply endless posts why we trivalized the content that others did the hard way..)
ChaosSlayer won't agree with me, but imo increasing level cap is not an option and not needed either. (again, I fail to see the point of the "lvl 150" type servers). This game is about having fun with friends while staying busy with what we do. If you spend this time with quality content (quests, raids, tasks, etc) while having fun, it really doest matter if your highest level is 50 or 150. Not to mention that most of the players rush to the level cap beacuse they simply want to raid and dont care about solo content. Not everyone after the solo play, and we have to keep that in mind too.
Even if we would raise the level cap, it would create a totally new server, kicking us out of balance for something that we can easily cover with other type of solo content.
We do introduce new content to every player, solo and raiders too. Changing/tuning existing zones is not only more work but harder to fit into our actual balance too. If you tune down a zone, you have to tune everything past that zone easier, else the difficulty gap will raise and we'll become unbalanced. So again, creating something new is not only more but easier too.
We always keep in mind that we have solo players. We are trying our best to stay solo friendly (alt-p, 100+ solo task/quests, ldon, tradable raid quality loot, backflag tokens, etc). But while we are trying to make our solo players happy, we have to keep in mind that we have hardcore raiders too who are proud of their achievement of beating each and every raid tiers. I know from experience, that if we would trivalize the access to any of the raid zones (that took weeks for others to get into), it would result in a big drama fest, and I could partially agree with those complaints (You saw this con very well in your post). So trust me, for many reasons, best to offer new content for solo players than twisting the existing raid content.
Lastly, with your logic, there would only be 5 tiers of raid zones all the time. It just won't cut it. We would like to offer a long line of progression, solo and raid aswell.
But again, we constantly keep brainstorming and aiming for the perfectiont to make everyone happy and turn THF into the best custom emu server.
Thanks again for your suggestions, I didn't mean this as a complete turn down, trust me, we do consider everything, thats why THF is what it is now.