Other point to touch on regarding customability, as some have mentioned the clothign dye I am going to put heavy support on that. Even if you include dropped high end gear (which I personally do not support, I think drop gear should be no better stat-wise than crafted stuff and not be common at all) the crafted items should start out plain, then be dyed for base colour and any sort of enhancement should overlay a pattern on it. Let me use cloth armor as an example.

Linen Robe... plain white, include base armor stats that are the SAME of all Linen Robes. Crafter can dye that robe any damn colour they want, it makes no impact on the base armor. However, in place of an "enchantment" you could "embroider" the item,  and during that embroidery procress you coudl choose to drop a vial of optional dye in the craftign window as well. Otherwise the default pattern shows up in white. The colour of the embroidery thread shoudl jsut be preference, but perhaps the different patterns are like magical runes or glyphs, maori swirls... the design is what makes the stat increase.

So White robe or White robe + embroidery LOOK the same but oen may have +whatever due to the embroidery. White on white blends in.

A Green robe with un-altered thread is green with white patterns, green thread would blend in.

Rather than having a tonne of different "Robes of the Jackalope" and shit, which each look a little different and which have a hodge podge of crappy colour combinations that make everyone look liek hobos, this lets the players choose their look. They can mix and match colours or patterns on armor pieces to get the stat increases they want. Higher level armors: Wool, Silk, Spider Silk, etc  would use an equivelant type of thread and that higher grade thread would mean that at a higher armor class that same design offers a better stat increase. There could even be more complex embroidery patterns that could only be used on the higher armor classes, ones that may include the same total numder in their +stats but which gives several types of stat at once... like a pattern that gives +2Agil +3Stam instead of jsut +5Stam as a basic pattern a the higher armor class does.

- This allows people who like their early on "look" and want to keep wearing the same appearance do so while still increasing their armor's armor-class (and probably increased durability)... look like a newb, decked out like a vet. Stealth ass kicker.

- More ornate embroidery on say Silk or Spider Silk levels mean people who want to show off that they have that higher armor class can make it glaringly obvious as the higher end embroideries are not reverse compatible to lower level armor classes.

This idea could be scaled up to apply to tooled leather and perhaps filigree on metal armor.