Well, to be fair... if the first half of the thread is outdated, then you only have 50 pages to go through.
(More accurately, every 15th post or so contains something durable; the rest are short-term discussions of side tactics or temporary gear combinations, particularly trinkets.)
If the spirit shard hood is yielding such good results for you in BT, then I'm very tempted to try that. The other options still seem grim. I'd hate to pour an entire MSD into an Incanter's, for example, just to test it against my 3-ruby SS. I'd also hate to spend my arena points on the hat, instead of the weapons I -really- want, unless I knew for sure it was an improvement. (Not to mention the thought of doing that and then seeing the hat drop on our next pick-up Kara.)