I've always been disappointed by the poor choice of armors for characters with the "forbidden plate" disadvantage. The total lack of a semi-decent protection apart (I've taken the disadvantage, so it's my problem, I'll live with it), being stuck after a dungeon or two with the same leather or chain armor to the end of the game become boring very quickly. And very un-stylish. And boasting about how much our character looks cool is a...30% of the fun in the game? For me is.
I don't think it should be too diffcult (but I don't know anything about code-writing, so maybe I'm wrong) to add some other metals for chain (elven, mithril and ebony maybe?) with lower bonus compared to plate of the same type, lighter and equally hard to find.
Same with leather, using maybe magic and non-magic creature's skin (elephant's? Deadroth's? I heard someone saying chitin?).
Put on everything an adequate palette changing and the job is done...or not?

I agree with you completely (as I'm sure others do as well); the lack of diversity in player armor/clothing options in Daggerfall has always been an annoyance. On the bright side, it should be one of the easiest things to fix. After all, armor and clothing is not rendered in-game, and there are already programs that allow you to edit in-game items (including armor).

Some time ago I tried to do that, but with little success. Not knowing anything about hex editing, I read everything I could find about the subject, as well as dagger hacking and modding.
I found out that there are a couple of problems: the first (if I understood well) is that you can't add object to the FALL.EXE, you can only change an existing one, and probably one of the same category (armor, weapon and so on); second, leather and chain simply ignore metal, color and protection bonus parameters, only the plate takes the relative bytes into consideration.
Obviously, that's a problem if you're trying to make mods with a hex editor, not if you're rewriting the game from scratch (they're doing that here, right?)...

Wrong. Not they - he's doing that here. Lucius the Man.

On a serious note I agree with original poster.

I was using plurale majestatis, you know... :p