My guardian is always ugly because I'm randomly slapping stuff together for stats. Though with all the set bonus stuff now it usually ends up at least a little more cohesive. I give out the 'best dressed' commendation randomly. Just a habit from when you needed to commend people endlessly to progress the guardian ranks or whatever.
Are you guys immersion gamers or something? It's really hard for me to care about what my character is wearing in a third-person game, let alone an FPS.
There's something to be said for a game (or any work) having a coherent, consistent art style, even if you aren't looking at your own character most of the time.
Destiny 1 was considerably more grounded and realistic with its armor sets, and there was a natural progression from the basic gear you started out with to gradually more impressive and built-up armor. Fantastical designs were reserved for the endgame that let people easily see that you were able to handle the toughest challenges, and thus they were rarer to see than your standard armor sets. This fit with the overall setting of the game, the remnants of humanity making do with what they had, and it helped set the tone of a struggle against mythical forces. Think medieval knights going off to slay a dragon.
Destiny 2 kept this going for a little while at the start with the actual gear you could wear, but very quickly they were putting in ornament sets that were wildly different from the established art style. It leaned more heavily into the fantastical designs, sometimes drawing from the game's own mythology but frequently just going with whatever design the artists decided to work on at the time. Holidays were even worse for this, with more and more armor sets being brought in that looked like cheap costume knockoffs than anything that would fit with the game's aesthetic. And that's without even getting into all the licensed crossovers that literally just ported designs from other franchises into the game. Now, there's no single "Guardian" aesthetic to point to, people can run around looking like Darth Vader or Slenderman or any number of Technicolor monstrosities. This does somewhat fit into the setting itself becoming more fantastical, but I don't know if there's causation either way. Did the game's story becoming less grounded lead to less grounded designs, or did a loosening of the game's aesthetics give leeway for the story to go wilder? I dunno.
To be fair, even after many years of these trends, I still notice most players shy away from being too ridiculous with their outfits. They may like to wear something flashy, but not to extreme eyerape levels. Lots of people still manage to create grounded and visually appealing outfits to run around in, which really does make the bad ones all the more jarring. I just miss the more uniform aesthetic that we used to have.
