1 - go to level 100 before thinking about upgrading anything
2 - purple / orange / teal / yellow gear will be released after time, its called miniseasons. each new miniseason makes the gearprogress of the one befrore worthless as the base values of the higher quality gear are always higher and better (vigor / stamina, the most important stats at all). dont waste time / gold upgrading the blue gear. wait for the purple if you want to participate in gearup. it wont be so long.
3 - I gear -> al rihat, battleground, II gear = handwork craftig, III = raids. percentage is increased by insignia item (get from al rihat). you can do a lot solo except raids. ouroboros is kind of auto group raid so the hassle of forming a group is not there thankfully. i dont know if ouroboro still drops III items. al rihat and crafting can be done alone. crafting takes time is tedious and expensive. but at least its actually useful now.
4 - i dont like the astral / ship stuff too. barely do it since we have al rihat. you can also (at max level) do these instances without the ship stuff, sign auto astral grp and after 5 min you are instant there with free mercs. thankfully you can do al rihat and kill all bosses every day to get the same results (spend all keys). sometimes in al rihat artifacts drop aswell though you dont really need the keys anyway anylonger. just do al rihat and get your gear to 106% by inignia from vendor. sometimes 115% stuff drops. good enough at least for me. gear changes so fast its highly questionable to put more effort into it than 106% / al rihat
so you can avoid that astral thing completely
i like how in al rihat sometimes spontaneous colaboration hapens when killing mobs. not even necessary to form a group. just hit the same monster. everyone ges loot
oh and dont forget to do quests in irene too. there is a vendor who sells draconic aspect gear, its a second gearset you wear additionally. you can get it from BG spc aswell but you better get gold from him