Wouldn't in that case just be better to play Exalted where you laugh at the "common people" problems and everything is powered by how awesome you are? Where Golden cities filled with jewels are at every corner and you don't care because a single donkey's jaw turns into a massacre weapon when in your hands? Ok there's the ocasional super artifact but those are strongly controled by the GM.
In all seriousness, no, despite the hype, Exalted is still highly item dependent, someone with good equipment will generally beat the tar out of an unarmed specialist. But that digresses. Wealth is significant, but the serious problem here is that the regulation of wealth varies. It does handle monty haul better than item starvation though, but thats because all useful magical equipment requires commitment, and committing your essence that way leaves you less fuel for your personal abilities.
The key concept of equipment as character power source is highly contingent upon the equipment being at the character's wealth level. However, only magical equipment manages to contribute noticeably to character power(a handful of exotic materials aside). In this case, players are exactly as strong as the equipped wealth they have, and if they manage to obtain more/less wealth than they are supposed to wield, their power is thrown off the scales.
In any adventure where a character's magical wealth is strictly material in nature(loot, magic mart, either way), you have these issues:
-If the magical wealth can be translated to and from material wealth, any means of increasing material wealth will increase magical wealth. Cue looting everything off the dungeon, including the adamantine doors and entire dismantled traps. While this behavior can be fun, it is disruptive in games where greed is not the primary motivator.
-If magical wealth cannot be purchased, then you have the issue where all their items come from loot/rewards. Unless you expend a large amount of effort to tailor all equipment to characters, characters will tend to be underequipped for their type. In the opposite direction, characters will be overequipped as there is no reason to dispose of old equipment.
-If magical power is mainly immaterial and directly derives from personal power(i.e. Incarnum), you lose the aspects of magical items.
So, basically, you need a few things
-A limit to magic items wielded. Limiting this by item slot or item quantity is irrelevant and only serves to confuse the issue. Limiting by vertical power(level) remains problematic as if someone gets hold of a dozen different types of wands of the same level, they have massive horizontal power of flexibility. Therefore, we limit it by item value, directly. Item crafting won't bypass your character's capacity to fuel magic items, though it will increase the variety of items you can expend said capacity on.
-Availability of item gain. Now, gaining equipment via plot is a time honored method, but too dependent on DM distribution skill. Using the above limiting mechanism, you can shower items on your players, or keep them spare, upgrading mundane to magical as they adventure. As long as the above capacity is filled or close to, this has no major problems.
Remember also that many items of legend had no special attributes until their wielder MADE them special. Hercules' hydra blood arrows, for example.
So the idea is this:
A number of spirit points equal to the original Wealth By Level.
Characters may attune equipment up to their capacity of spirit points, attuning an item being a free action, but releasing attunement being a full day. You can attune something that someone else is attuned to, but it takes a full day to break the other person's attunement.
Any attuned equipment can be used, regardless of who attuned the item.
Expendable items costs spirit points equal to the value of the charges used.
Lost spirit points(i.e. via expended items or destroyed equipment) recover at the rate of 1% of the character's WBL per day, up to a maximum of his WBL.
A character can turn any equipment he has used regularly for at least a week into any standard magic item of the same type by expending it's new value in spirit points. He can convert a lesser magic item into an enhanced version of itself this way. Major Artifacts cannot be altered in this manner unless specifically stated otherwise. Lesser Artifacts can be so modified if the character is capable of creating artifacts and is at least as powerful as the original creator.
Equipment can be attuned for less than their maximum value, if they have a lesser version. If a character invests the value of a +2 Belt of Strength into a +6 Belt of Strength, he gains only the benefit of a +2 Belt of Strength.