I personally love a lot the artifact job sets, but the race specific gear right now in FF is honestly horrid, cause none of it actually looks like it should be exclusive to that race for any realistic reason.

And the reason why in my opinion is because the game generally fails to immediately immerse you in your races culture in the way that Guild Wars 2 does, instead it immerses you in the city-states. No one really complains about grand company armor being locked to those factions, why? Well first off because it's trivial to switch between them, but I think it's also because you are immediately immersed into the culture of the major starting cities, and you quickly see that those outfits represent a kind of military force, they have reason and purpose for existing that you can immediately see and understand in the world.

Hempen sets don't really work that way cause they're just essentially underwear. And the starter sets just barely scrape by on being unique enough to warrant being locked, just barely. (I know, the lore book goes into a tiny amount of detail with them.)
As much as I would love to see thoughtful and interesting race specific sets, I have zero faith in SE to actually deliver on it. I do however believe in them for city-state themed sets, as they've shown they can do those well.
And as for job gear I never saw to great of a reason why generic job armor is locked, I would be fine with it being unlocked so long as you have that job leveled to use it. But artifact gear should absolutely never be unlocked. It just makes sense to exist on only that job, it was designed for that job in mind and is more or less a status symbol for that job, generic armor is only locked to adhere to generic RPG rules rather than in world rules.