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Endgame in FFXI is glamour a process of acquiring "tiers" of gear - you need a certain quality of gear to successfully challenge monsters to get better gear. With that better gear, you can challenge harder monsters for even better gear. Rinse and repeat forever! It's the gear treadmill we all love, but with a ton of horizontal progression because you can gear-swap in the middle of combat.

I've separated these tiers of gear into various quality levels:

1. BBQ: For pre-Adoulin returners and new players. Requires no 99 or ilvl content and is enough to get you started hunting for actual gear. If THF is not your first job and you have another with ilvl gear, you can probably skip this entirely.
   Includes gear from Adoulin bayld, Records of Eminence sparks, Abyssea, original Dynamis, and pre-99 story content (anything before Seekers of Adoulin). This isn't party-acceptable gear, you will be carried, so please only party with good friends until you get the next tier!
   

2. 0Q: A minimum standard for THF gear, using entirely solo content!
   Reforged AF and Relic +1, Reforged Empyrean NQ, Domain Invasion, Ambuscade NQ, 119 UNMs, Alluvion Skirmish, old HTBFs. 1m gil cap for gear bought from the AH (either on Bahamut or Asura).
   

3. NQ: Gear requiring or greatly benefitting from parties.
   This improves on the 0Q set with additions from Omen drops and AF +2, Relic +2, Vagary Empyrean +1, Abjurations, Ambuscade +2 and JSE back, 128 UNMs, Delve, Escha Zi'tah and Ru'Aun. 5m gil cap from the AH.
   

4. HQ: Gear from harder / grindier / more expensive sources. Assumes you have your 5% Dual Wield job gift from having 550 or more Job Points.
   Omen AF +3, Divergence JSE neck +1 and Relic +3, Sortie Empyrean +2 and JSE ear NQ, Sinister Reign (beware: random augments!), all UNMs, Reisenjima, Odyssey unaugmented, new HTBFs (Odin, Cait Sith, Alexander, Lilith, Shinryu), 10m gil cap.
   Notably excludes RMEA (Relic Mythic Empyrean Aeonic and now Prime) weapons, empyrean AF +3, JSE neck +2, JSE ear +2, augmented Odyssey gear. I hope you have a good LS by now :p
   

5. QQ: What about the "everything in the game" tier? Should you get a Mandau or a Aeneas? Check out BG Wiki's community sets. This guide is focused on getting to that "everything in the game" tier, it's a ton of work to update this tier every time the game is patched, and I'd just be repeating other people's words.
   

A geared THF should have at the very least: a TP set, a TP with TH set, a weaponskill (WS) set for each WS worth their while, and a Damage Taken -% (DT) set for survival. At higher tiers of gearing you'll want to have multiple versions of each set for situational purposes. Let's break it down!

TP Set
A TP set is a gearset that attempts to maximize "white damage", your auto-attack damage, while also getting 1000 or more TP as quickly as possible in order to use a weaponskill. The "quickly as possible" part is done by maximizing attack speed. For a THF, this means 26% equipment haste, up to 44% magic haste, and the rest from Dual Wield or Haste Samba. Your trusts Koru-Moru and Joachim will give you Haste II for 30% magic haste and Victory March for 15% magic haste respectively if you're solo, so the magic part is covered. With Dual Wield, having too much is a bad thing - extra Dual Wield will lower your TP gain per swing but not also reduce your attack delay.

A TP set also needs enough accuracy to hit the 99% accuracy cap on appropriate content, then once accuracy is at cap we want Triple Attack for more attacks and Store TP for better TP generation. Well geared THFs will have sets - or at least equipment swaps - for different accuracy requirements, and for different levels of magic haste. If you know your target's evasion, then you can /checkparam <me> to see your accuracy. You want (evasion + 48) accuracy on your mainhand and (evasion + 40) accuracy on your offhand for capped accuracy.

Finally, you'll want to be able to substitute in TH gear without major losses in relevant stats.

WS Sets
Rudra's Storm and Mandalic Stab are single-hit skills that scale with DEX, so we focus on DEX and Weapon Skill Damage+ (WSD+) gear.
Evisceration is multi-hit and can crit, so we look for DEX, accuracy (only the first hit gets +100 accuracy), crit damage and crit chance, but not WSD+ (because it only works on the first hit).
Aeolian Edge is single-hit and magical. We focus on WSD+, Magic Attack Bunnies (MAB), and INT.
Other weaponskills in your toolkit are Exenterator (multihit, AGI-based), Shark Bite (two hit, DEX/AGI equal scaling), and Dancing Edge (multihit, DEX/CHR scaling), but you should be reserving these for if you really need to trigger a specific skillchain. At our level - especially with kaja knife or Tauret - you'll want to use Evisceration for unstacked 1000 TP weaponskills, and skillchain with Rudra's Storm stacked with SA or TA. Things get a lot more complicated with RMEA weapons.

DT sets
These come in many flavors, but the general rule is to aim for -50% Physical Damage Taken (PDT) and -22% Magic Damage Taken (MDT) because Shell V gives you 28% MDT, and you cap at -50% PDT / MDT. "Damage Taken -%" stats count for both PDT and MDT.
The flavoring is what else do you want on this set - do you want to be able to TP in it? Then it's a "hybrid" DT/TP set - maybe with less DT and more TP. Do you want to be able to evade attacks entirely? What about magic evasion? What about Magic Defense Bonus? Lots of possibilities.

Other sets
You can always get more gear for utility purposes like Regen, Poison (to combat Sleep), Ranged, Sword skill, Hand-to-Hand skill, Steal... but I probably won't include all of those sets here.