People talking about what armor looks like when most of us are going to glamour over it anyway. Anything you would like, you'd keep to glamour with eventually.

For the different stats, like DRG has more HP than MNK, NIN, SAM, I'd rather they raised the base stats according to job stone, or had a hidden stat multiplier related to the job stone, to give the varying values that exist now. People that play Monster Hunter know a similar system if you've ever taken a look at motion values per weapon. It's a great system that really allows each weapon(job for XIV) to be different without having to tailor armor specifically to them.

Those fearing that they'd lose variety in gear looks, I think it'd help more in the long run. Right now they have to design fending, maiming, striking, aiming, scouting, casting and healing (7) and we see past models being reused anyway. If it got slimmed down to fending, striking, aiming, healing and casting (5), it might promote more varied armor due to needing to create less overall armor every new dungeon, raid, savage, tomestone, PvP, crafted and whatever else I missed.

However, I don't see SE every changing this anytime soon, if ever.