Firstly and simply, I’d love for Town Clothing skins to be available as Armor Skins.
The Pirate Captain outfit, for example, would be excellent as both a Light and Medium armor skin. (I’m fine paying gems for this) Lyssa knows female Light armor wearers have no actual pants to wear that don’t come with butt flaps or skirts.
There are other fabulous town skins that would be great to use on the actual battlefield, since I spent infinitely more time in normal armor, out and about, than I do occasionally glimpsing some in-town only clothes.
More broadly (remember that Lyssa and pants comment?), I’d actually rather all kinds of clothing & armor were transmutable. Necromancer in gothic plate? Why not. Warrior in a skimpy dress? Sure!
As armor types are already shared between multiple professions, and there are many tasty options available in each armor class, I don’t see an argument in “but you only see Necromancers wearing that kind of gear!” One could argue that it’s not thematically appropriate for a Necromancer to wear gothic plate (I’d disagree), and that’s of course up to you, ANet.
But I don’t see any game balance issues in making all armor transmutable. In PvP, for example, I know what kind of enemy I’m looking at because of the skills used and the icon next to a player’s name – not the kind of armor they’re wearing (again, professions share an armor class).
So, ultimately, a lot more diversity (and spent resources) would come about by having universally transmutable armor skins… and since loot is individual, there’s no one to cry foul about the Mesmer stealing the cool heavy armor helmet with a skull on top. (And character race models are the same regardless of profession, so no extra coding there, as far as my noob-level knowledge guesses)
But I’d be happy with only just a Pirate Captain Pants on my Thief or any of my Light armor characters. (Pants interfere with scholarly magic, maybe?)
Thanks for reading~