The armory system has always been advertised as freedom to equip stuff, and it is such. Just like in XI when you leveled a job for a sub job, in this game you level another class for those abilities, its similar but different. An update literally from last friday listed changes on how they want to proceed with the armory system. On top of that specializations known as jobs are coming (in 1.21) . Information on class ability changes will be coming in the future.

As the poster above me said, keep races as an aesthetic choice. There are beginning stat differences at the moment but that is it. Simply stated, because of the freedom of the system, restricting our stats based on a race we choose is a bad move.

As to your other point about feeling different, you lost me. It does make a difference between DoW and DoM. Like DoM's ability to AoE magic. Also cross classed skills suffer a penalty, but this allows you to play different than other players. You can equip aoe weaponskill, single target, weaponskills with debuffs. Whatever you want, and then play that style. With that said, of course there are obvious choices that make your damage higher. But as a melee if you want to be defensive you can equip skills like that, or cures/second wind to be efficient and help your healers.

Also races have differences within them, I'll use miqote as an example:

Keeper of the moon has > fangs, larger bust, longer tail(with colored tip), different color styles available
Seeker of the sun has > no fangs, smaller bust, shorter tail (no colored tip), different color styles available