I think we should have rare mounts and items, spells and skills really are a thing that should be learnt at the level you are at,otherwise you could have someone running around at level 15 taking down level 30-40s with a few hits, it would be quite wierd :/
Also, getting gold doesn't really do much as the best armor in the game is achieved through instancing so if we receive items (not necessarily armor or weapons).
Infact, if you wanted to give out items, a good thing to do would be to make an event item and call it that. When someone wins the event they receive this item. Once they have received a number of these "event items" they can trade them with a GM/Admin for something really powerful ingame, whether it be raid armor/pvp armor/weapons/quest item/rare mount etc.