TD:DR you don't need the best gear for the biggest fish as i caught a 74 pound uni on 20 pound line with a 24 pound reel. so take advantage of it and you save money aswell by not having to buy new gear. just use lower level gear as it rewards you more xp and you gain the skill aswell. Now lower level gear is actually challenging and rewards the player for skill rather than abusing game mechanics. in my profile i still have a 30.525 pound common aligator gnar as my 3rd biggest fish caught that was caught using very low level gear with small cutbait from that time so you can imagine how broken the mechanics were back then. iirc all you needed was like level 3-5 gear and you were already catching the biggest fish in the game with very little effort. It was done because back in the day (about a year ago) you could catch aligator gnar (biggest fish at the time) with low level gear and make a ton of money and alot of xp. you can imagine how upset everyone was when overfishing for less xp was implemented. the system before that gave you the same xp for any gear so there was no point or purpose using higher level gear when all you needed was lower level gear.

Overfishing a species was bad as it made grinding levels a real unbearable grind and the game was simply not fun to play when that was changed. this is way better than the old system where using any gear would give you less xp after overfishing that fish (aka diminishing xp overtime). The player is aware because in the patch notes when the change was done it said that using low level gear gave more xp than using higher level gear for the same fish.

Gearing for alaska fishing planet