Vanity system feels more complex than it needs to be...

[ispano]

Yes you can, when its a visual difference, its easy to do, it just requires displaying a different model instead of the intended one. (which is basically what the game is doing anyway)

The saddest part though is in a few years this game is going to be held back massively because of PS3, just like FF11 was.

I think you missed my point. You can't do it and leave a large chunk of your playerbase out of it. ESPECIALLY when your biggest user base, in this case JP players, are more likely to use the PS3 than PC. Also, showing a different skin isn't the issue. It's the ui information needed for the "simple" system people want that causes the memory issue.

It's really silly they couldn't go with a second vanity tab system because that apparently takes more memory, but hey they've also said text somehow takes up more memory than images before. At least crafters have stuff to do and profit from now anyway.

I won't claim to know in this case, but images, ie textures and such are likely put into Video Memory, not system memory. Whereas text would need to be held in System memory to be formatted and then pumped to the GPU and Video Memory.