I have played quite a few characters between Oblivion and Skyrim. One thing that happens inevitably with all of my characters is that they end up in one of two armors. Either the best heavy or light armors and therefore all my characters look the same. I know there is an easy way around this but not without a massive sacrifice in armor rating.

I think that instead of making armors so different in armor rating they should make armor rating based solely on light or heavy armor skill and then the character's ability to improve the armor with the armorer skill (based on Skyrim's system). So basically keep the armor's base level and maximum level fairly similar overall if not the same with the only big jump in rating being between light armor and heavy armor.

This would allow a paladin type character to wear steel armor without a massive sacrifice compared to Daedric or Dragon armor. Or a proud elf wearing Elven armor without sacrificing armor rating. I think overall the significance of aesthetics of an armor should be taken into consideration here for role playing purposes.

And realistically this is probably more true to life in the sense that heavy armor should mean more protection, so all heavy armors should be comparable to one another and thus greater at protecting than light armors.

There is probably a mod for this to level out the difference between steel and daedric or elven and glass. Should probably put down my PS3 sticks and buy a gaming computer already.

Is anybody else in the same boat?

This.

BGS doesn't want to give you options in the vanilla game, so use the tools they provided to add them in. Works for MW.