Smoother item progression

I noticed that GGG acknowledged that the the item progression could be smoother in high levels and that they are open to suggestions on that regard. So, in that spirit, I dare to make some suggestions on that regard.

Trading is the simplest solution, but many people do not like to trade. I personally don't trade, because it makes the game harder and consequently makes drops more intresting.

Apart from trading, there seems to be two good solutions for making the progression smoother:
1) Improve crafting so that crafting an item takes orbs + relevant other items (items with the mods/sockets). I suggested something like this way back, but it was not picked up. So this is not going to happen.
2) Change the role of sockets and gems.

5 and especially 6 linked items are expensive to craft and the price of upgrading your 6-linked armour is just not worth the effort. But what if those 5 and 6 links would not be that crucial?

What if gems would work like this:
- Base gems would gain relatively more power with level ups
- Support gems would not augment skills, but rather just change their functionality.

So a level 20 skill would do roughly the same damge that, say, a 5 or 4 linked skill of that level would do now, but it would function differently based on the support gems.

Simple examples:
Inc. melee damage -> more damage, but less attack speed
Faster attacks -> faster attacks, but less damage
Fire penetration -> less fire res, but less elemental dam (or csat speed)
reduced mana -> reduced mana cost and less cast speed
Empower -> extra levels and more cost

The idea would be that the the average dps would remain roughly even, but there would be differences based on monster types. Heavily armoured opponents would be good to bash with a slow but heavy attack, while againts fast and light monsters you would use fast less powerful attacks. But even a single lone skill gems would work ok on average.

This would mean that you would not just have a single spam-attack, but you could utilise a range of different types of attacks. You could come up with intresting combos and tactics and there would be more room for skillful play. It would also make the choice of support gems more intresting.

Also, it would make item progression smoother in terms of links, since you could still get good dps with less links.

This would require some work with rebalancing the gems, but I don't see that as something impossible.

...

It is a shame they did not see any problems with the exp-penalty system, but can't be helped.