Character Advancement

[fridayparson]

I'm thinking of coming back to the game after a 25 year hiatus, and trying to sell a new GURPS campaign to my group. The stumbling block is that while the character creation is amazing, the reason our group stopped playing GURPS was the character advancement, or the lack thereof.

The issue was/is that, with the exception of skills, once one creates a character there is no real advancement to look forward to. Unlike games such as D&D, GURPS characters can play an entire campaign and maybe get to increase a few skills and buy some marginally better equipment. That's not very rewarding for 20 sessions of gaming.

The problem lies in that most of the coolest stuff are things like Advantages, most of which one can't get after creation and stat increases are prohibitively expensive. By contrast in games like D&D, all the coolest stuff is to be earned during play and leveling. In other words after 20 sessions a GURPS character is basically the same. 20 sessions of D&D and one has earned many more abilities, HP, and is exponentially more badass.

While I'm sure some reading this may want to snap off a "git guud scrub" or a "if you don't like GURPS gtfo", I was hoping someone may have a homebrew solution, or any other advice I can use to get my group excited about GURPS again?