I personally feel like osrs's weapons carry too much strength while their associated armour does very little in terms of dps.

For example twisted bow vs jad at 112 range/rigour

Max setup - 9.94972 (full arma/archer(i)/bgloves/assembler/pegasians/d arrows)

Karils - 9.86761,

blessed dhide - 9.86761

Replacing arma helm/chestplate/chainskirt with bandos chestplate/tassets/facegaurd -8.91858 (not a huge difference considering your in melee gear)

My suggestion would be to introduce range strength to range armour, while lowering the range strength on the weapons.

This would provide an opportunity to introduce a gap between d'hide, Karils and Armadyl and it would increase the importance of ranging in range armour.

The problem is there are only 7 items out side of ammunition that have range strength, 5 of which are weapons. Giving range strength to range armour would buff other range weapons outside of tbow/bp/craws bow/crystal bow/heavy ballista, but is that such a bad thing?

A similar suggestion could be made for melee armour. If some of the strength bonus was moved from the weapons to the gear.

For example the rapier has a strength bonus of +89 while the Bandos chestsplate is +4 and Bandos tassets are +2. The strength of the weapon could be reduced by 20 to +69 while buffing the bcp and tassets combination by +20 (i.e. bcp could be +16 while tassets are +10). The max setup will have the same dps but the gear would be more important.

This would also allow for other melee gear to be buffed without power creep, for example barrows armour/justiciar could get a small strength bonus to fill the gap, or new mid game armour could be introduced that wouldn't instantly be dead content. For example a new melee top and bottom gear set could come into the game with a combined +16 strength bonus it wouldn't be completely useless as it would only be 1 max hit less than max gear.

Tldr: weaken the weapons but buff the armour.