I literally lost all faith in the Maple community.

Can you guys imagine? Back in 06-07 you were cut off from boss runs if you even had a hacker on your BL. Now you'll be kicked from boss runs because you don't have good enough gear, aka hacked gear. Soon that will become a minimum, even the NX players will have difficulty keeping up, assuming they stay with legitimate gear.

A game where you're punished for being legit, can you guys not see it coming? Or is it already here?

You've been "punished for playing legit" for a while now, but that's the community at large's fault for having low-functioning autism. If you have a non-retarded guild/alliance/BL and don't try to compare yourself to "the best" in the entire game who's equips (along with themselves) are obviously rotten beyond repair at this point, then this is much less of an issue than is made out especially with instanced boss rooms coming our way.

The "equip-race" aspect of Maplestory died off years ago and should not even be considered any more since hackers control the "standard" which no legitimate player can reasonably achieve (or in the case of 4 line potes, can even achieve at all). They also make sure the largely adolescent player-base are sufficiently insecure about their own equips and sufficiently jaded at Nexon, despite having probably only played for months, to throw hundreds of dollars at them (the hackers) with the promise of finally being "good".