I totally understand what you are saying. I am saying that a version of what you are/were putting forth already exists and it was according to bungie designed for the exact same purpose that you put forth. The system could probably use some work and could probably be expanded upon, but the example that you came up with in your first post used a scenario that already exists in the game. And again it is way too early to tell how this works out in practice. As it stands I don't see a big problem with the affinity system, because it is not hard to get an armor piece with the general stat allocation you want and the right element. We need to let players tinker with it a bit before throwing it out with the bath water.