I agree that the current armour system is anything but unfinished since you're either impervious or completely vulnerable and defenseless.
But as you said yourself, I hardly think that essentially doubling the amount of status effects is the best solution. If we should try to find a middleground I think it would be possible to use mos of the existing status effects and just have them applied to enemies under the condition that their armour bar is below a certain threshold. For example, if a character is hit by a knockdown skill and their armour bar is above 66% nothing happens, but if it's below they get slowed or weakened for a single turn. 'Physical' crowd control skills like knocked down, crippled and weak could result in the target having lowered their initiative, AP, slowed (-50% move speed) or something else for a single turn. Magical skills would be a bit trickier since their effects tend to be more unique and you'd have to come up with something that could cover all of the elemental weaknesses.
I realise this isn't a very good solution as it probably would conflict with the existing system that applies the skill effect if the ability deals enough damage to 'break through' the armour and it ultimately doesn't solve the fact that players are likely to end up auto attacking or using weak abilities to chip through the armour so that they can unload their 'big' abilities later on.
Perhaps another solution could be to have abilities apply their respective effects provided that they deal enough damage. For instance if an ability deals more damage than a certain percentage of the character's maximum (could be anything, 10%, 25%, 33%...) the armour is ignored and the skill effect is still applied. That way players don't have to either save their important abilities until the last turn of combat or 'waste it' by throwing it away in the first turn.
Ultimately I'd prefer it if we just went back to the original game's willpower/bodybuilding stats system, but since it doesn't seem that's going to happen I guess we have to think up a solution to the current armour system's problem. It is in no way finished and ready for release.
