Most of the BPOs are only mildly, if at all, more powerful than the starter gear and removing their functionality in favor of making them purely cosmetic is something I highly oppose. I didn't buy the dren pack for the brown color scheme and I would have zero use for it in that state. I didn't buy the EVE collectors edition for a templar 'skin' to put on my suits, nor would it be useful to have a dropsuit that looked like a logi but didn't provide any of the equipment slots etc.
The current starter gear offers a free assault role but no others, making BPOs superficial not only strips the value of products that are already bought and paid for (in real currency not ISK) it biases game play in favor of one role over all others, and it also flies in the face of New Eden precedence, there are still T2 BPOs in EVE despite their no longer being seeded into the game and players who hold those wield a much greater advantage over their counterparts than possession of the current BPOs grants, nor did those players pay IRL cash for those T2 BPOs they were simply paying the same game access fee as everyone else (which in the case of Dust is a fee of zero).

If CCP ever makes such a move they'd better at least offer a high value conversion of those BPOs into Omega boosters so that those who've spent actual money on the game (starting as far back as closed beta) aren't stuck with only cosmetic nonsense for which we have no use and for which we would not have paid in the first place.

0.02 ISK
Cross

PS ~ I have nothing against the concept of adding skins as described. If folks want those then by all means add them, but a paint job can never be a substitute for an actual asset and it's a notable breach of trust to change a purchase from useful to cosmetic after it's been paid for.

EDIT: One further note, in current game state PC does vastly more to stabilize the in game econ than the BPOs, consider the earnings value per day of one district to the number of meta 1 fits which a player would have to lose to equal the same ISK footprint. If CCP is deeply concerned about the current state of the in game economy they have bigger fish to fry, and ones that don't involve altering the value of IRL purchases.

I paid for my BPOs and I would be perfectly fine if they were converted to cosmetic items. Getting beat up over paying for virtual assets is a pretty silly thing when all video games have an end-date. MAG just recently died for good, as a perfect example.

But yes, BPO's do have a major in-game impact on the economy. Sure, Standard/Militia stuff is dirt cheap and all but you're thinking short term, the single death. Assuming that I save 10,000 ISK per suit (a stretch at the standard/militia level), that doesn't sound like much on a battle-to-battle scenario but since I've been playing? I would have saved 63,830,000 ISK. That's a lot in Dust terms. I'm also not going to be losing any ISK from this point on and will continue to save ISK endlessly, it's riskless income.

This isn't to say that PC isn't a major contributor to economic impact but that's a strawman argument. They're separate issues. Just as well, this isn't to say that there shouldn't be compensation for any changes made but face it; people are going to ***** just by CCP even touching them at all. I'd much rather people get angry and quit the game for the sake of the game's overall health than let it fester at the game's expense.

And sure, T2 BPOs are a thing in Eve Online... but they're so rare... They're -insanely- hard to come by and when you do, the auctions are incredible. It's like Capital ships in high-sec it's so rare. I'm glad we're moving away from the BPO non-sense because it never should have existed in the first place, I never did agree with them; it's just people paying money so they can have a notable edge over those that didn't - same as the Boosters.

EDIT: Further more, T2 BPO's in Eve Online still have material costs. They still cost -SOMETHING-.