I think that rewards that apply outside of quest would definitely encourage people to do the hard quests, the weapon level system is really cool and it speeds up the process but it doesn't really mean anything outside of quest. Permanent and/or temporary vanity items (clothing or weapons that have the same stats as LVL99) would be amazing and give questers equips to show off. Especially now that quests shouldn't be as exploitable (at least from what I gathered here), I think it's something that could be reconsidered as I know it's been discussed in the past
