It's very basic: a jeweler puts some magnifying glasses to help him cut precious gems, a blacksmith puts on special clothes to prevent dirtying his normal clothes, and use the best tools he has, a customer selects a good attire when buying stuff so the assistant seller looks at him as a good potential client and treat him well, etc...
I suppose it feels wrong to you because, as Rizziliant put it, you both expect to make sacrifice in order to be well-rounded, and in fact I could potentially agree, but it's not the player fault if gear swapping is enough. Obviously, in roleplaying terms, getting dressed as a blacksmith does not make you a blacksmith. But in Divinity, per developper design, it does.
There are too much non-combat bonuses on gear.
One way to adress it would be to severely reduce the non-combat bonuses on gear, but that wouldn't be sufficient because most non-combat abilities are useless (even if Rizzilian says otherwise). You'd also need to buff the non-combat abilities. Either by adding combat bonuses to them (which goes counter to Rizziliant's philosophy, because she want to make a well-rounded character and make sacrifices, and mine because it would then reduce choice to a mathematical analysis with one good choice and one bad choice, not different choices), either by buffing their native effect by a lot (bartering and lucky charm are very ineffective ways of earning gold, esp. compared to crafting/blacksmithing).
Another way to adress it would be to separate them and set them on different budgets. You would then roleplay according to how you want to roleplay, not according to what you are ready to sacrifice in combat abilities.
