Glimmer hound? Do you know how expensive it is to masterwork even 1 set of armour? It's insanely expensive no matter who you are. You can't really just switch out mods since weapon mods are scattered between the elements. Switching mods out won't have a strong impact since the weapons you're using most likely don't share elements so the only mods you can switch are general mods which are so expensive that any build you make will suffer massively the moment you slot one of them. An issue with stats is they're so low even for base rolls and they only improve at masterwork. So it's much harder to manage a stat build. And depending on the build you want you need specific stat distribution. "I believe the intention was to find the armor that suited the class you wanted to play, and maximize" the issue here with that is most people like using multiple classes. And depending on what you're doing you almost need to use specific classes. In a raid it's almost required to have a Well of Radiance or now Ward of Dawn. But not many people want to exclusively use Well of Radiance all the time to make it worth only having armour suited for that build. The same goes for not everyone wants to run bottom tree gunslinger with nighthawk. Depending on what you're doing you need to use different classes otherwise you're going to have a bad time. If you're doing something that's a long hard fight Well or Ward is basically a requirement, if you're doing something that needs you to do a ton of damage quickly Voidwalker or Nighthawk Gunslinger is basically a requirement, if you're doing something where you're dealing with tons of enemies a lot Stormcaller, Nightstalker, or Shards Bladebarrage etc are basically a requirement. Making it so they want you to pick one class, stick to that class, and build for that class even though you have the ability to freely use any subclass you want and using different subclasses is needed is kind of a dumb idea.