I play in old days.
I craft my S grade set in Blood of Oath Chronicle (not in C4), I craft it "SOLO", and no, in old days you can farm entire set parts in spoil, only the recipe of armors are hardcore (varka/ketra).
Epics don't drop great good things (epic tauti/octavis/istina/balok) usualy drop the same trash (see juji tests).
The complete removal of drop/spoil of parts and put it in hardcore quests is not good thing.
Also, in old times, L2 is not based in VR and REFLECT.
This is a example of "unfair" boss farm:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2k4V5o6pGA
In old days you can buy gemstone S with AA, farm in catacombs and yes, you can farm a good ammount of S gemstones in a solo pole @ catacombs. In this days you need adena to buy R gem but you can't find adena in the game (as real player), 1 spoil / 30 min of R gem is not good (in AOE party), if I want spoil all my gems for R set i'll need 62 days in spoil @ EG, 16 days farming parts in HB and buy adena from RMT to supply the adena to buy parts from HB NPC. Consider I don't play 24/7; I play only 5 hours / day. To farm with one party, one R99 set I need 374 days.
Farm one set / year appear to be good for you?
C5 - Farm my own set solo in 3 months (p2p) (3 accounts - Heal+ISS+DN)
Valiance - Farm one set with one party of live players in 1 year (p2w - 7 accounts, live players)
Also the tome is a quest item and maph rune appear don't help with tome drop rate (maybe juji test) and spoil (no probelm about spoil, R99 mats can't be spoiled).
Update:
Hellbound - Dynasty set, I farm my Dyn Set in Gracia Part 1 (also some ppl's of my clan, near 30 sets in 6 months).
Gracia Epilogue - I farm my moirai in 2 months.
HF - Easy to farm all sets/weapons since l2 launch.
GOD P1 - Everyone got R armor
GOD P2 - None, I'm leveling with +6 event armor
GOD P3 - None, I'm leveling with +6 event armor
Tauti - R95, all droped by monsters
Valiance - Need buy adena + play as insane for 1 year to farm my set.
Even if you did "Solo" your S Grade set back in C4 (I have my doubts), it was certainly not "fast" or anything even approaching fast (especially if done solo). Those sets were hard to farm back then and mostly top clans got them early on. Even the quests they put in for Recs/Mats after S Grade was put in required thousands of MOB kills per turn-in and gave the Recs and Parts out at random. In C4, those spots weren't as easily soloable as they were in later expansions (and esp. after the attribute system was put in.
I still think the price of gear is a bit ridiculous as it forces most new players to ebay practically all of their equipment, and drop rates do leave much to be desired, but the grass was not greener back then. You aren't the only one who had to farm S Grade gear. You're really using a bit of revisionist history with a lot of fog thrown in with it to try to make it look like it was much easier back then, when it wasn't.
A level 75-77 Archer was not plowing the places where you'd camp out to farm S grade gear in C4. That would have taken forever to do and required like 4 (decently leveled, by C4 standards) boxed buffer accounts to do with any sense of efficiently.
You needed a ton of S Gems so while you could buy them with AA you'd have needed to do a ton of farming in catacombs outside of farming the other leveling spots for Recs and Parts (which are given at random). Of course, you could also sell or trade the parts and Recs that you didn't need for your own set as well to speed the farming somewhat.
Everyone got base gear in GoD so the need to make it super easy is not there. The only thing that threw the system out of balance was the fact that GMs are inactive and people were able to "fast track" themselves to end-game in many cases, unfairly.