I have always found the mage armor spells in the alteration tree to be vey frustrating to use. The main problems for me are that I have to continuously recast them and pay attention to when they are up and down and this is just too much of a nuisance or me. As a result I usually don't use them and rely on evasion and become ethereal as my primary physical defenses since I don't want to wear actual armor. While this strategy is good most of the time enemy archers prove to be an Achilles heel. Experimenting around I have found a way that I believe solves this problem in a balanced manner. As many of you know the fortify alteration potion increases the duration of alteration spells by an amount dependent on the strength of the potion. Using the fortify restoration loop I created an extremely strong fortify alteration potion. I drank the potion and then cast oakflesh. Checking my active effects indicated that the oakflesh spell had a duration of 300,000+ hours. This means that you can make any of the flesh spells become essentially permanent. The fortify restoration glitch can certainly be abused to make the game trivial but in this case I believe that if you wait until you reach apprentice, adept, expert, and master level in alteration to make the respective stoneflesh, ironflesh, ebonyflesh, and dragonhide spells permanent with this method the game will still remain balanced. Doing so would give mages a path to reaching a permanent armor cap in a progressive way using magic skills as opposed to smithing and armor so that you can preserve mage roleplay. I imagine countless others have also thought of this idea but I thought I would post it anyway just in case some mage player has not considered it.

You can also acquire the Mage Armour and Stability perks which increase the strength when wearing robes and the length of time in which they last.

And I have never really had an issue with it myself.