This all misses my point. What I was explaining is that you don’t need a skinning mechanic for placeables, because they’re crafted from mats. Instead of crafting (for example) an improved blacksmith’s bench and then reskinning it into an Aesir Blacksmith Bench – which would require reworking the game code to introduce a new mechanic – they can simply make the Aesir Blacksmith Bench require 100 bricks and 100 iron reinforcements to be placed, and make it behave like an improved blacksmith bench.
In fact, they already have offerings like that. For example, Magian Chalk Circle is differently-skinned Circle of Power, from AoS Battle Pass. Normally, when you open the list of sorcery crafting stations in your construction hammer, you’ll see the option to craft Circle of Power for 100 brick, 200 bonemeal, and 50 steel bars. If you have that BP reward, you’ll also see an option to craft the Magian Chalk Circle for 100 brick, 200 bonemeal, and 50 steel bars. You can craft and place either, and they both behave exactly the same.
The only reason the Aesir Blacksmith Bench is the equivalent of a T1 is because Funcom made it that way. There’s no reason they couldn’t have made it T2 or T3. In fact, there’s no reason why they couldn’t have added recipes for T1, T2, and T3 variants of the Aesir Blacksmith Bench.
Implementing a skinning mechanic for placeables would not remove the need to add those blueprints anyway. They would still have to add a separate blueprint for each variant.
I hope I’ve managed to explain it better this time.
I suspect you weren’t paying attention, so I’ll just point out that @darthphysicist confirmed that reskinned pets are their own “species”, i.e. they have their own blueprints. The bug I linked is simply a case of botched blueprint, kinda like the Arcane Bookcases and Arcane Curio Cabinets that had 40 rows instead of 40 slots.
The whole reason I pointed that out in the first place was to explain that the pet skinning system does not work the way you thought it did, which why we don’t need a special skinning system for placeables.
Let’s face it: whatever they decide, there will be people screaming about how it sucks. If they make the stats OP, people will scream about P2W. If they make the stats slightly better, even by just 1 or 2 points of damage (e.g. Khitan bow), people will still scream P2W. If they make the stats any worse than what’s in base game, even by 1 or 2 points, people will bitch about “pay to lose”.
As far as I’m concerned, I believe that the only two things they should do is: 1) make sure the paid stuff doesn’t offer any significant advantage, and 2) make sure everyone knows what they’re buying before they buy it. Everything else should be based on what they think will sell the best, and screw people complaining on the forums, because you can’t please them and they’re pretty much the only ones talking in the first place. (The ones who are satisfied rarely, if ever, post about it.)
The problem right now is that they don’t do a good job of either of those two things. From time to time, they still add something seriously OP and it ends up being P2W. To make things worse, people buy things like the Lost Dungeon set or the Aesir Blacksmith’s Bench without having the full information about them, and then get rightfully pissed off that they spent money on something they wouldn’t have bought if they only had the actual freaking information about it.
See? This is exactly what I was talking about above. People are prepared to cry how it’s “unfair” for the smallest details. Yeah, it would be “unfair”, but not nearly enough to make a fuss about it. Dear Mitra, someone paid for a recipe and now they don’t have to do one specific dungeon. That’s terrible, whatever shall we do about that injustice? 
Long story short, this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot 
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. It has to be a really good armor set now to get me buying it. Plus we have soooooo many armor pieces, soooooo many and vanilla is the most used by me. I am just in love with the dragon hide set and khitan headband.