Leveling up champions is boring, slow, and not satisfying

I just recently got Meatball on my main and seeing him start at ilvl 700ish and was really painful when everybody else I have is 900 and purple. It took me the longest time to get him up to max ilvl, and then way longer to get him purple, while the entire time hoping for good RNG to gear him out.In the end, I had to make him do every short mission I could get for the higher turnaround time for exp, while at the same time trying to time his missions to end around the times that I would be playing, so that I could make him a body guard and take him with me on world quests to get him exp faster.While he was leveling up, I had to prioritize every single mission that rewarded armor tokens to get his ilvl up. I didn't/couldn't even consider doing AP/rep quests until there were no more armor tokens on the board.Now that he's max level and purple, I'm having trouble gearing him up. My last legendary equipment I got were the "reward AP/gold with world quests" which might have been nice when AP was really worth anything, but now I need so much AP that I don't bother using my tokens until I run out of bag space because the little bits and pieces don't do anything for me. I have the class hall talent that lets me spend OR for equipment but I have yet to truly see it give me anything useful: just a bunch of "reduce time by 5%" tokens or the GREEN equipment that gives you bonuses when using minions. GREEN. All my champions by now have blue/purple armor but this useless order hall talent still gives me GREEN equipment.So that's my main. I just got an alt to 110 as well some weeks back and have been trying to bring all his champions to 110 and max level as well. The thing is, they gain xp so slowly that I still have guys that are sub 110 because I haven't been able to swap them into active roles yet. Meanwhile, I'm blowing through every single armor ilvl token and I still need more because they aren't so common. On this alt I also have the talent that lets me spend OR on equipment and from what I can tell it's the same story: I get a lot of useless green equipment (get 25 gold, get 50 OR, reduce duration by 5%…) but very very rarely do I see anything actually useful.