Should outfits be customizable?

It seems that each week, there is a new reddit or forum thread asking Anet to make outfits more customizable. Players want to add the headpiece of their own, some even suggest making gloves, shoulders and boots customizable.

I'm not against that, I'd rather all outfits to be converted to armor skins, however I understand quite well, why the outfits are like they are.

Let's think about it. To create an outfit, you need at least 5 versions of it, one for each race. Let's say that there will be a different version for each gender. So now we need to create 10 versions of one outfit. Each race has at least 5 different body types. We can double it for each gender again.
Now there needs to be at least 10 proportional versions of 1 outfit for each gender of race. So far we need to test, tweak and check 100 versions of one outfit.

Seems like a lot for one outfit, doesn't it?

That's however not all, because of specific proportions, heights and body types, there needs to be an extensive testing and checking for clipping. Thanks to the pieces not being customizable, it's quite easy in comparison to the armors because you test one skin configuration and you don't need to care about other skins clipping through.

There are roughly 80 different armor sets for each armor type. The process of creating an armor is in comparison to creating an outfit roughly similar, however the testing is MUCH more time consuming. You can imagine how much longer can it be if instead of one armor set you need to check for the issues with all other 80 different ones.

It's crazy.

Creation of the outfits is just much easier and much less time consuming. There are much less clipping issues. And less time spent on creation of the outfits is more time spent on creation of armor.

I too was a little disappointed by the number of new armor sets, introduced in HoT, but now that I thought about all this, I can understand. (Though I hope that we'll get at least 3-4 more in LS3 ;) )

And for those mentioning, how much more armor there was in GW1, I say: are you that stupid? There were only humans. One race! 5 times less work! Of course there were much more armor sets!

To conclude this topic, I'd say that I'll rather have the outfits that are not customizable, though it would be so good! Slayer shoulders, Noble Count's chest, Mad Scientist's headpiece... but I'll rather see the devs spend time solving clipping issues for ingame-obtainable armor than gemstore stuff.

Just a quick sidenote: if anyone from Anet reads this... please remake the town clothes tonics into outfits at least ;)