If you are against this simply because of the time and effort it would take to get enough gear for pvp battles... That was sort of the point. Make it more difficult to build high end gear, so that hardcore PVPers would need to BUY it from hardcore crafters...
In PVP, gear just gets circulated around anyway, so if you are constantly needing to buy, or make, more gear for PVP, it's probably because you suck.
As for the 'not enough risk to get high levels', there's plenty of ways around that, including nerfing exp as other people have said, making it dangerous to farm certain resources etc. Besides, does everything *need* to be dangerous in this game? Sure, 'wasteland is harsh hur dur', but most players don't really go out of their way to put themselves in high-risk situations, and would prefer the steady accumulation of money and stuff that is another way to play survival games like this.
Regardless though, this thread has been dead for a month... Why beat a dead horse?