This is a big problem. Because I think from the developers standpoint, transparency isn't really an issue because they don't view the game as being metrical in a lot of ways, they think that there's sufficient difficulty that having solid scaling and strong class passives matter less than not standing in the bad. But at the same time, the reality is that the MMO crowd is almost always able to push a game down to the lowest common denominator to do things like minimize movement and simply stack CD's or healing to overcome mechanics that are supposed to be means of limiting DPS or HPS.....when they aren't.
There's many reasons for this, but the main offender in my mind is that tanking is so optional and AoE aggro doesn't exist. If one or two people are expected to have high passive damage reductions and health, it goes a long way to preventing things from being so thoroughly dominated by sheer metrics. And from applying subjective values to things like the Templar Restoring Light Tree that aren't essentially strong enough to necessitate keeping the class' DPS potential from being so putrid.
Nor is it a logical reason why heavy armor is so pathetic. They've tried to reinvent the wheel in a lot of ways and it hasn't worked. Only recently have instances come out where stack up and spam zerg isn't the best option. And it is still by far the most dominant PVP tactics.