Male Spring Bottoms. What the hell?

[Lauront]

Because it's true? Or rather, it's become very obvious. But you wouldn't know would you? Probably not. If you look at nearly all the gear (especially caster and healer gear) starting from HW to now, it's either a dress or some "coat" at that is cleverly disguised as a dress. Lot of them look overly feminine. Have you seen the caster SB leveling (62-68) gear? Especially the lvl 64 Caster gear. It's feminine looking and it's ugly at that.

Caster gear isn't even that bad in general, it's a mix of outfits. Healer outfits though are atrocious for males. It's not even the robes that are the issue. Most of the robes look pretty good on male characters and the BLM and RDM ones even have a masculine edge to them. It's outfits like the SMN AF1 set, or the Republican caster/healer sets, that just don't fit a male character very well. Not because they show off body, which IMO is fine, but because of the overall design of the fabrics. I agree with your suggestion to make a male/female variant of outfits that lack a unisex design. Maybe not gender-lock it for the minority who like putting girly outfits on guys and vice versa.

The problem is a lack of options that hurts everyone involved, if we had more options no one would've picked on any one set that goes heavily in either direction because there would've been something to offset it like there is for females most of the time. Some people want to run their male characters as wearing more femininie clothes - not necessarily the Generic Robes™ casters get (and what if I want that, but for my tank? I'm screwed), especially when you look at the variety of outfits female characters get. And then you have the people who want more masculine outfits, who either get screwed over because the set is unisex so they have to put in a boob-window a-la lore tank set (I personally like that on guys, but I get why people complain), or because their idea of what guys wear is what we got in this case, Generic Pants™ that don't even look that good. Pants can look good, I adore the AF3 BRD pants, but they're the extreme minority. Sometimes I have a hard time telling apart the Best Man's slacks from the Butler's slacks from the Slacks of Eternal Passion. Sure, I have 3 options for pants. But are they really options if I can't really tell them apart?
And yes, people can and will complain either way. But these pants in particular are just plain and uninspired, I can't imagine either side is overly happy with them.

Yeah, I think they could resolve this by making a variant of each set intended for each gender but not gender locking it. It'd be a bit more design effort but 1) they have a cash shop and 2) the sub isn't exactly cheap, so I am tired of cop outs and excuses for not spending money on the game.