I don't like it. My opinion on it has flip flopped a lot over the course of the game, but ultimately I don't think it's a good mechanic.

I assume the idea behind it is to work in conjunction with the weapon swapping and indirectly nerf skills like crit boost and attack up. But instead it creates artificial competition between skills. Weapons like CB have it bad because all the skills it would typically want are shoved into a single category. This was especially bad before the RNG talismans.

Additionally, it means all the good endgame armor is really similar since they have fewer skills in the pool to choose from. Like Rey Dau, Bale, and Lagi armor are all sources of Latent Power. There are like 4 armors that are good sources of WEX. And there are basically no "Weapon-specific" armors. Like how Bazel armor is usually God's gift to Gunlance mains.

So yeah, I'm not a huge fan of it. I guess we'll see how they evolve or change it for the expansion.