The point of that, you see, is to set yourself higher standard and grind more to be able to reach their level. You can have the best stuff if you put a decent amount of efforts onto it. Blueblade actually managed to get unarmed 61 because he was fed up loosing to me. 
Well not entirely but see, he grinded to reach that level, and it didn’t take him years.
Survival isn’t Kitpvp, you don’t PvP for leaderboards at all, but for fun~ and it’s fine if you loose or not, just that it’s up to you to decide not to loose again and try your best to reach higher.
(If that can help, I got my very first 40 swords levels through a small iron farm I had in a little desert, and it didn’t take me more than a week to reach those levels).
I get that some crate gadgets are OP but you won’t even see some items being actually abusively used on fights, such as egg launcher and more because they aren’t abusively common. Some summer crate gadgets tho… there has been a lot of keyalls. And even if, nothing stops you from buying the gadget from someone. Survival is grinding, you can get yourself a good amount of gold, buy some pvp stuff and shred people. :)