Why are armor and weapon skins separate blueprints? Wouldn't it be better to have them work like ship paints?

So it's a tech limitation at the moment, where if we want a red version of a blue helmet, we've got to make a new entity, and the red is bound to that entity. And so in order to craft that red helmet, you need a blueprint for that red one specifically. That's not the long-term goal. The long-term goal is a paint-like system, but the paints aren't physical. So it's, in a very British way, a digital license to apply the paint.