Pre-AOS, armor just protected against physical attacks; we had the skill "magic resistance" to protect against.....wait for it.....you'll never guess........MAGIC!!!!
Suddenly, magic resist was nerfed practically out of existence, and we had to get out a calculator just to see whether a piece of armor would fit our suits, since that old skill had changed to not one, but FOUR different armor resists. Figuring out whether a piece of armor is worth looting is even intimidating for us veterans; I mostly just leave everything on the Miasma and Swoop corpses and collect the gold and marties. It's not worth the time and effort to figure out whether anything in that huge mess of junk is worth picking up. The only time I loot anything is if I log in with the crappy EC and grab items with a score of 400+ for unraveling. I can imagine how bad it would be for a new player.
It isn't just that they made the armor calculations so complicated, either. They had to make leather armor more powerful than plate, and threw in some artifacts so powerful that any player who wanted to PvP or even PvM effectively would have to wear it, despite the fact that none of it matched any of the rest of their armor and it often looked terrible.
I would like to see armor changed back to a simpler system. If they insist on armor deflecting magic attacks, they should simplify it to just "physical resist" and "magic resist". Having 4 types of magic resist just makes it too difficult to make a matching set of armor.
If I was the head of development for UO at the time of AOS, I would have fired the babbling lunatic who came up with the idea of making armor have 5 separate resists and changing the magic resist skill, and kept it just like it was. The old phrase "if it ain't broke, only a fool will fix it till it is" comes to mind. At this late date, I guess the only way to do it would be to just combine all 4 magic resists into 1, and have armor just say "physical resist" and "magic resist". It would be easy to fix all the current armor so that it would work with the new system: Just total all 4 numbers, then divide by 4 to get the new magic resist number.
I would drop the maximum resists to 50 for leather, 65 for studded, ringmail, wood and chain, and increase it to 80 for plate, with appropriate penalties to dex and meditation. Then I would get rid of the "mage armor" property. Each step up in armor would bring about a corresponding penalty to meditation. 1x for cloth, 3/4 for leather, 1/2 for studded, 1/4 for chain, 1/6 for plate. Only a strong, dextrous warrior could wear plate. Only a pure mage would want to wear cloth or leather. Studded, ring and chain would be for stealthers, archers, warrior/mage hybrids, ninja, etc.
On a side note, if they allowed us to change artifacts to match the rest of our suits, people would be proud to wear great GM crafted armor again, not ashamed of the mismatched mess that armor has become.
For the first half of its life, UO was a skill-dominated game. Players won and lost battles by their wits and strategy. UO only became an item-and power-scroll-dominated mess after AOS came out. Pre-AOS, I was about average in skills. Post-AOS, I was nearly indestructible for a while with 90 DCI, 120 parry, 100 LJ and an axe of the heavens, till they nerfed my template out of existence. The devs thought AOS would bring in a lot of new players. It didn't. They thought that the veterans would like the ability to be practically indestructible gods of UO, since we could grab all of the power scrolls and either eat them to become even more powerful, or sell them for so much gold that we could never spend it all. We didn't. Once all of the victims, trammies and newbies gave up trying to get their own power scrolls, and only the uber-equipped, 6x legendary multi-millionaire players could survive in Fel anymore, it got boring; most of the PvP veterans either moved to pre-AOS free shards, moved on to other games, or quit altogether; most new players were overwhelmed by the complexity of the equipment, couldn't see any way to get the PvP rewards and artifacts that they needed to ever compete effectively in either PvP or PvM, found that the skill gain system was tedious, impossibly time consuming, and in some cases, irreparably broken after it was changed to accomodate power scrolls, and just left as soon as their trial subscription expired; that's really why Fel is practically a graveyard on most shards now, and UO's subscription base declined from the UO:Rennaisance era's high of nearly 300k to its current anemic levels within months of the introduction of AOS. We all voted with our pocketbooks that we hated AOS, but the Dev team back then never once thought of putting things back the way they were, back when the game was fun. They just arrogantly told us over and over, till it became like a broken record, here on Stratics and other places, that we could like it or leave it. So we left. Some of us have come back for ML and SA, but most of us didn't.