I will definitely agree that as far as textures/technology goes, SE's way behind. I just feel that they usually have a way of taking pretty low specs and making it look great. It's really just a personal preference of mine- I guess it's because I grew up liking a lot of war historical things and Arthurian legends.
The DRG AF is certainly crazy looking but I meant more as a general rule. Just take that chainmail you're wearing in that top screenshot there...it's very simply designed, but the way it's designed, it has this..."realistic", simplistic design to it that I really like, which is something SE seems to do a lot more overall. Robes and such tend to be bit more uniform across games, yeah.
Compare that to say, the armor in Tera your character was wearing
here, or the armor your character wears in Aion
here. These are all pretty mid-level armors. For me, it contributes a lot to the overall feel and experience you'll get when you run around the game world- lots of other peeps, after all.
Funny thing is that as much shit people throw at WoW for having crazy armor designs, characters look pretty normal in
mid-level armor (though I guess not so much when you get clown-inized by quest and/or dungeon running), though one thing that drives me crazy about the armor in WoW is that it all looks so...flat. I mean, that thing's supposed to be a mail of some sort, where FFXI had iron scale mail look like
this.