FFXI's gear swap was like having extra skills.

[Razor]

oh ffs, it has nothing to do with laziness. I don't know about you, but I sure as hell don't have enough room in my inventory to carry multiple sets of gears for every single fking class/job. Maybe you enjoy running around being 200/200 and 150/150 on both retainers (which is gonna get taken away anyway), but the rest of us sure as hell don't. It's a piss-poor system that was the accidental result of piss-poor game design

Because wanting to maximize efficiency is piss-poor game design everything design.

Why do we own a variety of different clothes ranging from heavy winter coats to tank tops? Because a tank-top in winter does about as good as a winter coat does in summer. Why do winter-tires exist when there are all-season tires? Hell, why do cars even exist if trucks could get every job done? Why do shotguns have slug ammunition but also buck-shot?

Efficiency. One particular piece of equipment/etc is not going to work in every situation. Just like all-season clothes/tires, there are things that are tailored to work well in most conditions but fall short of their specialized counterparts. (ie: Tabards in XIV are designed to be a well-rounded compromise between heavy defense and DD capability but are inferior to Buccanneer's Shirt and Cobalt Plate mail in both categories.)

For people like you, the all-purpose things would work well. You obviously would sacrifice maximum efficiency for the sake of inventory space and that is OK. But for other people who wish to carry around multiple sets of gear to be better at every facet of our job, we should we allowed to. I should be able to switch to gear that maximizes the damage from Riot Blade (in effect maximizing the enmity+) in between the times where I am getting the snot beat out of me while wearing Sentinel's.

EDIT: Yoshi said that the Mannequinn system he has in mind would remove the Mannequinn'd gear from inventory and store it in a separate slot. (like how crystals have their own place).