Sonya - I think - was the one that brought in this change?
To my memory, she tried to assist and take the role of RP gear and perzs and that sort of stuff, along with raising the prices of perzes and we suddenly had a limit on perzs too.
The limit I don't disagree with too much, it does make you pick and choose what's important to you.
Perhaps perz's and one-time only items could be re-evaluted. At the end of the day, some quest items aren't too difficult to re-get, but by the same token, some are, and when someone has done the quest heaps of times before, and they lose the item due to a DT, or worse - pwipes and or flag losses for [insert reasons here], it starts getting a bit rediculous - in the sense that we then have to make an alt, lvl up an alt, just to re-get a piece of eq.
One of the things that holds people back from continuing playing is the loss of gear, and the utter pain in the ass effort it takes to get some things back.
A recent example is Loran, who dt'd. Without proper gear, it's extremely hard to get back even basic "good" eq to even get enough damage to TRY to get the better eq back again. It's a tough climb to the top, when you have nothing. It does add to people not continuing to play.
But, that's just my personal stance, and I know I'm not alone in thinking that either...
Perhaps molly, Kvetch or Diandra could re-visit the changes that were made to these issues, since most of us are saying "Where's the rationale for it?" anyway...
There's a difference between keeping things interesting and having a bit of a challenge, and making life harder than it should be in 4d.