Why does getting armor or evasion from gear have to be so painful?

Defense is a hot button topic right now. Armor and evasion are some of the most basic and obvious defensive mechanics, and the ones most new players tend to assume are the ones to focus on. This tendency royally fucks over those newbies most of the time, because just trying to get as much armor or evasion on gear as you can and then picking up a bunch of increased nodes on the tree is not good.

Why is that? You can get reasonably good armor stats on all of your gear, path to most of the more efficient armor nodes, and your armor will still not be doing all that much for you.

There are builds that stack armor or evasion to great success, but they almost always rely on gimmicky methods of actually getting the stats rather than prioritizing rolls on gear. Determination aura juicing, iron reflexes, flasks, guardian, etc - almost all of the really high armor builds don't actually wear much... armor. Evasion has a similar problem, though to a lesser extent. There are some exceptions, like sst glads that can afford to prioritize armor more than most because it's a damage stat on the shield, or juggs doubling body armor. But on the whole "investing in armor/evasion" might as well read "lighting your chaos orbs on fire" for most builds.

For all that "armor sucks" seems to be a popular meme around here, armor and evasion really are quite good defensive layers to incorporate. It's just that the "normal" way of incorporating them is atrocious, so you either ignore them entirely or find specific combos.

I feel like making armor and evasion rolls on gear actually mean something significant would be a welcome change.