With a transmog system you don't collect an item, you collect separately a stat block and an appearance. While it was fine in Hogwarts Legacy because of their super generic stat blocks, I find such a system silly in D&D since items have a strong identity that reflect those stats and effects. An "ugly" item has a reason to be that way and it tells a story about your character, its play style, and the adventure it went through.
Is it a no-loss feature? Yes. I have a thousand other features I would like to see first though.
An item by definition is "a stat block and an appearance", trying to draw an imaginary line here is (poorly) arguing for the sake of argument. Leather armor doesn't have some super deep worldbuilding lore for being ugly, its just ugly, and if you really need it to be ugly, you're in luck - you can always just keep the item's standard appearance.
"Wow, its the robe of summer, and instead of green, its
red! Such deep lore!" How can any self respecting person take such a thing seriously? It tells a story about your character? "Hey guys, remember that time I found a really ugly shirt that was 1 AC higher?", truly a tale for the ages.
Takes nothing away? What if it isn't just wizard robes, what if it's the Robes of Vecna, should you be allowed to visually swap out those robes just because they "harsh your vibe"
...Yes? Is this a serious question, or some weird post-irony thing where you argue facetiously to try and highlight how ridiculous opposition to an outfit system would be?
If you encounter "the Robes of Vecna", and you enjoy the way they look, you...keep the way they look. And if you don't, you don't. If you feel somehow penalized or slighted by total strangers not looking the way you'd prefer them to look in a single player video game, I don't know what to tell you, or how to take you seriously.
What if you're given raiment from a divine avatar, and people comment about it when you wear it, but you're not really wearing it.
What if I create a Drow but change the skin color to the exact same tone as Shadowheart, giving nobody any visual indication of any kind that I'm a Drow, and yet characters still say things like "holy hells, under-elf!" when they see me?
What if equipped item string is stored in variable X, and equipped appearance string is stored in variable Y, and the item-based commentary that doesn't exist in this game and that we have no reason to expect were to instead reference variable Y instead of variable X? What if Larian needed to take fifteen, maybe as many as twenty extra minutes to make such a change in order to support an extremely common and basic feature?
Should you be allowed to just willy-nilly decide what your character is wearing because you, outside of the game, want to play dress-up?
Yes, of course. Kind of like how I can already be a Lolth-sworn Drow with blue eyes, or a dainty human barbarian girl with 21 strength and reddit hair, or any number of other appearance customizations that divorce lore, mechanics, logical sense, and visual depiction, all while simultaneously not bothering any sane person because of their totally voluntary nature.
This compulsion to control the appearance of strangers in a single player RPG is absolutely bizarre, and is leading people down a path where they have to start hallucinating armor commentary features or imagining non-existent Half-Plate +1 lore to try and justify it.
