If they want to touch the check system at all, maybe they should consider making it actually useful. Half the playerbase doesn't even know what the messages about defense and evasion mean, and if you did it's still not only requires a bit of calculation to know what its saying, but it's still a highly imprecise measurement.

I'd really prefer Item Level just be a way to show advancement visibly.
This. What's the point of having item levels if they're just going to be functionally the same as a job level? You might as well have just increased the level cap. I get the need to have ilevel to give a general idea of what kind of strength the item was planned with, but having it actually affect the gameplay in a way like this is just unnecessary and annoying.