So yeah, gafguild is dead..again..still...one of those.
It seems to be down intermittently these days, Ferny and I kept missing each other on Steam yesterday, but he said he had some news. Will keep you guys posted. It is up now, though.
It's very difficult to judge armors before the finalized version.
On one hand, yay, we get to see cool stuff that's coming and get excited about it.
On the other, the developers are frustrated that incomplete work that isn't meant to be seen publicly (and not just armor, Living Story details too, see Marjory's apparent death last season), things that are meant for China (the whole VIP access people lost their shit over), things that should be surprises or aren't actually going to happen (like the school outfits / bikinis). Then the community, who takes even a datamined item code as a "Promise from the Devs", whines about things not being implemented yet when there was never any intention to implement them at all.
I imagine if there was some way to keep that sort of unfinished stuff out of the builds, they would since this has been an ongoing problem. I actually wish they would start trolling the dataminers by slipping in models and data for things that couldn't possibly exist. Have somebody make really rough models of flying cars, or put in data for items that suggest a new "Owlsmith" crafting profession that just makes owl statues out of wood and metal.
Unfortunately, there's no way for the community to stop datamining. Even That_Shaman, who is usually pretty respectful when it comes to major spoilers, has dropped a fair amount of info that shouldn't have been released. For every miner who knows not to post crap like that, there's 3 who don't care and just want Reddit Karma or whatever.