For my purposes as a casual player, the temple armor is as good as I need. Better armor would be ascended armor - which you can either level up in crafting to make your own, get as a drop, or buy some from vendors. Same thing applies for weapons - ascended weapons are better, which you can craft for yourself, get as a drop, or buy from special vendors(laurels, guild commendations, wvw tournament tickets). You can't get ascended pieces from other players since it becomes account-bound on acquisition. Specific builds of armor would be for dungeon running or wvw builds, which you could look into based on how you enjoy playing.
As a recommendation for what do coming back, there are new maps that have opened up because of the special events that you can explore over in the magumma jungle, though I don't think you'll be able to play the stories if you weren't logging in when they were active. You can play the stories going forward, though.
Also, Oldgoat has a Sunday story mode dungeon event and is scheduled to do the arah dungeon (last part of the story) in Feb if you want to complete that.