At this point, they have measures in place that are intended to speed you along to endgame. There are XP boosts and generous amounts of experience given for Weekly and Daily missions (my personal choice is Veteran Flashpoints), as well as items such as Outlander Tokens to create L60 or L65 toons right off the bat. There's also a new item called the Master's Datacron, which boosts a character immediately to L70 and provides him/her a set of gear (as well as your starship). More info about that here -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaBvZE-SSlIOnce you hit L70, you start on Galactic Command, which basically gives you advancement past that. The ranks currently go from 1-300, divided into four Tiers of endgame gear. When you first hit L70, you'll be in Tier 1, so you will be hoping to get set bonus gear with a rating of 230. IIRC, Tier 2 has set bonus gear at 236, Tier 3 has 242, and Tier 4 has 248. You'll get these items randomly via crates after every new rank is achieved. People were pretty annoyed at first with the Galactic Command system, but the devs really have gone out of their way to adjust it and make it work. At this point, I think it functions pretty well, and the game as a whole is pretty fun. Give it a try!
BTW, what server were you on? They've done some rearranging...