Ok we all know that asecended gear’s advantage in stats over exotics is miliscule, and the real point is that they’re account rather then soulbound. But that hits the wall when you pass them from one character to another which has totally different skins along with look & feel.
Sure you can transmutate, but what if you switch those weapons between your characters often, like daily?
So my suggestion is this – ascended weapons and armor would memorize each skin they’ve been transmutated into. To get a new skin, you would have to use transmutation charge like with anything else, but after that the new skin is saved in armor’s memory, and you can switch to that look free of charge at your leisure, to make that ascended really sharable between your toons.