Yes. This is a game with RPG and FPS elements. That's the POINT. And yes, you CAN just jump in and play in battles that are, to some degree "fair" on you - in HighSec. If you're willing to take up the challenge of fighting high-tier opponents, you can go to LowSec or NullSec for that, but if you're under-geared, there's a disadvantage involved in doing so.

PlanetSide 2 has also RPG element and, hey, NO MATCHMAKING: you jump in and have 3 continents (64km wide each) and can have fun 24/7 with any kind of player, just like you do in any FPS.

FPS literally means First-Person Shooter. This game has shooting, and is first person. Anything beyond that is PERSONAL PREFERENCE. Deus Ex didn't fit the usual mold, and was AMAZING. Human Revolution tried too hard to be a modern FPS and not hard enough to be a Deus Ex game, and was only decent. Plenty of other games have done things that are outside of the normal rules that their genre follows (including FPS games), and succeeded.

When I said "how you shoot people" I was talking about performance & video quality in FPS.

I will be more precise next time.
Also I KNOW what FPS means but if you have a tag slapped next to you name it doesn't mean you are worthy of it!

I also don't see the relevance. DUST's gear SHOULD be less tiered than it is, BUT IT SHOULD STILL BE TIERED. Expensive gear = advantage. But the advantage, at the moment, is often larger than it should be.

First this "expensive grear = advantage" is a CCP mentality...a RPG mentality.

In many FPS you unlock more gear but not necessarily that gear gives you an advantage.
I can unlock a SMG with higher fire rate but that has less damage: no advantage just balance!
When you loose something to get something there can't be an advantage: tradeoff are the way to go in FPS not scaling gear as in RPG!
Really giving advantages from gear is wrong in FPS: this is how overpowered weapons come to life and this is how you unbalance/break a FPS!

But even while saying that (again), there's another point I should make. If you SPECIALISE in a certain aspect early on, you can build up a reasonable amount of skills and buy some decent gear for a particular role VERY EARLY ON. It's only when you're moving into being good at a little of everything that it becomes more difficult

You cant make "difficult" for the player to achieve variety in a FPS: it should take more time to unlock everything (this happens already in a every FPS) but it should not be "difficult".

CCP said specialization is the key of Dust 514; they said it clearly many times that they expect you to specialize "like in real life"...but this isn't real life this is a VIDEO GAME and NOBODY plays VG to have the limitations of real life.
Really CCP want us to do/be 1-2 thing only: to choose a role and stick to it (They don't even give you all options at day one).
People get bored by repetition in FPS when they can be many classes and have hundreds of different weapons and in Dust we are supposed to be 1 class or have stick around 7 YEARS to be able to have total variety!
Why do you think people want new things from FPS: because variety is far more appealing then specialization!
In FPS specialization = stagnation.
Hell in VG doing/being only 1 thing is stagnation!