Punitive gears are gears with overall undesirable effects/stats
that a player will never want to wear or keep in inventory.
These gears are worse than junks, they're meant to punish a
player for doing (or not doing) something.

Punitive gears are often designed with curse flag, negative stats,
forced into player's inventory and forced upon player to wear it.
It is sometimes deployed in popular levelling areas to create
"challenges" for the players. Punitive gears are also often
very high levelled (ie lvl 250) so that their curse flags will
be very hard to remove.

However there are some clear situations that punitive gears have
no part to play. 

1. Keys
If it is a very very important and hard to obtain key in a mass
epic run, it may be ok to leave nodrop on it. 
But making an easily obtainable key lvl250 and curse flagged as 
a punitive gear serves no purpose, adds no value to the game.

2. Routine gear drops on mobs
Once again, if by making these punitive in nature serves no value
added purpose to the gameplay, it should not be there.

As a builder, tier levelled EQ should only be used on items of
important values, such as final rewards. Making keys level250
curse flags serve no purpose except to troll players.
Example:
     (K)(I) a Prismatic Key (250)
     (K)(I) a Gleaming Key (250)
     (K)(I) a Shimmering Key (250)

So why do builders add punitive gears in places that seem to 
serve no purpose anyway? Who knows, sometimes it is to because
some of these punitive measures do not affect the builders as
the builders have a certain wish?