I think the weirdest part about the DOS2 armor system is that a fair number of people seem to be in agreement that simply having one combined armor system instead of a physical/magical split would have solved the majority of balancing problems it presented. It would have also removed the need to add armor values to accessories, which would have stamped down the stat bloat by quite a lot.

The devs could still differentiate physical and magical damage in an indirect way by putting a greater emphasis on elemental resistances in regards to magic damage (so more heavily armored enemies would probably have lower across the board elemental resistance or resistance into the negatives), which was very under-utilized outside of a few gimmick enemies with 75+% resistances.