Now I'll try to make this fairly short, seeing as the title should be a huge hint at what I'm about to talk about, and that is cosmetic "Statless" slots, slots that, when equipped with a certain equipment, would replace the armor visuals of your character model.

Basically, a few games I've played had this feature, one of which was Spiral Knights. The feature in Spiral Knights did basically what I just mentioned. You could equip any sort of armor in the slot, and it would appear as your main armor on your character model, while keeping the stats of your "normal" equip slots. Now, this actually seems to have little importance now (it does have little importance now compared to current tasks), however, I could see it being a very big feature later on.

One thing I disliked about FFXI was the difficulty(not actual difficulty, just pure time spent sitting at HNMs and other things of the sort, the actual battles did not seem difficult at the time) to get certain NEEDED armors, such as Salvage armor and HNM kings drops(both pre-level 80 update). I'm not saying getting useful gear should be a walk in the park, but it should not be totally ridiculous to obtain job/class changing armors... However, it wouldn't be so bad if it was difficult to get certain cosmetic armors, right? And they would still be valuable if you could actually wear them without a stat loss, I'd assume.

I think everyone knows where I'm going with this at this point. Sorry if some things don't make sense, I'm rather out of it right now, feel free to post suggestions/thoughts/whatever. Sorry if this has already been suggested.

tl;dr add cosmetic slots/armors to wear over your current armor(as well as making it possible to wear non cosmetic armors in the cosmetic slot, just with no stat gain, stats only come form the current slots provided).