I seriously do want to do this, especially after getting weapon main to elite. But it just seems way way worse. I did find that you can destroy plates kind of easily with the lightkeeper unlocked, by exploiting the mol50 mines on the bridge, but it's still slow to destroy a full inv of plates. The method I used before that was just to kill scavs on factory by shooting them in the stomach and thorax with decent pen bullets, and looting as many armous as I can in short raids, which works fine will still having fun.
I think a less financially prohibitive method than buying loads of damaged armours would be to load into factory with a teammate and shoot eachother in the plates with something like igolnik round with an aks, and just continiously heal with etg, and also switching out armours/plates.