I read the first few pages of this thread - sorry for not piling through all 17 pages, but thought I would still make my point, which may not have been made amongst the very good responses here.
On the subject of armour:
Rather than necessarily sticking to a particular type of armour, it would be good if players had to consider the situation with which they are faced and for armour choice to be an important contributor to their success or failure. The same soldier may find themselves part of a tight phalanx with heavy armour and shields one day, and using guerilla tactics with light armour in a wood the next day.
For example, if you know you're going to have to fight through several miles of goblin tunnels to fetch a relatively mundane item, or as a shortcut to going around the mountain, then you would probably dress light, be flexible and move swiftly. If you knew you would be confronting a band of pikemen with covering archery fire from long distance, you would want to be heavily protected.
Ideally you would visit the armourer and swap out and back as appropriate for a reasonable fee. The problem with previous RPGs is that you could never do this for a reasonable fee - in those games you would have carried all the spare armour you needed, or you would store it in a random chest (knowing it would be there when you returned, which itself was sometimes unrealistic).
I think making the trade-off between damage resistance (from armour) and mobility should be very important.
I do think durability of armour and weapons is an important aspect of 'realism' in considering a character's inventory, but the feature must be considered in light of the gameplay - I think the less hardcore players of the game would get pretty irate with weapons constantly breaking in the middle of battle.
Hopefully a useful contribution.
