Good thread.

I still think SE devs are overthinking the no blinking issues. I do not believe that it would be hard to let the clients stop continuous visual update of gear while in battle. I have heard that a third party plugin that is less than 500kB big can implement such a functionality. Of course, I have never tried this plugin so I don't have first hand experience. It seems very unlikely that SE devs wouldn't be able to make a similar feature.