Did wie play the same raids? Because even KOG admitted, that they did not like the competitive part of it. The higher your score compared to others, the more material you got.
Anyway, normalization in PvP will never happen. From a business point of view, PvP exists to drive sales. Ereda simply wasn't popular enough to matter. If you make it a gear war chances are, nobody would play it. If I remember correctly the first Ereda did not have normalization and it wasn't exactly popular.
To be honest, simply change it back to how it was in S2. KOG should have never listen to the players in that regard. No need for any fancy ideas which may just screw things up again.