Well if you see how the balancing has been done, Shields have no resists; where-as Armour does.
This means that even if you have the same Armour as Shields, the Shield disappear ALOT quicker under fire.

Effectively speaking, with Shields it's all about Alpha Strike to beat them.
Where-as with Armour it's about sustained firepower.

This is why the Gallente Tank is actually considerably more difficult to break than the Caldari Tank. You see the same thing when talking about the Caldari Assault Suit (considerably larger shields) next to the Amarr Heavy Suit (considerably more Armour)

On the whole I think the balance is alright.

Re: OP
I'm generally for the idea of bringing Armor and Shields in line. In essence I think that someone who's running Proto gear with top skills (i.e. Rank V) should be getting equivalent protection regardless of whether those choices lean toward armor or shields (clearly this is a general statement, the weapons that are designed to do more damage to one or the other would still function as normal so the equivalency is on average not mean to make them identical).

Addendum:
That being said CCP just nerfed the effective value of armor even more in the last hot fix by stripping War Points off of the Repair Tool thus giving LogiBros less reason to try and Skill into/Fit one.

Wow ccp, thanks for making this Shields 514

Also, although I hate whate they did, they had to do it. In a hotfix, all they can do is alter point values and throw true/false switches, so they 0ed out repair, threw the false switch for tactical_Assault_Rifle_auto, and switched the points for PSs. Not the most clean thing, and I won't be calling in my Heavy suit anymore because I'll never get repaired now but I can see why they did it...

Anything to make armor and shield a bit more even, I say. Especially those utterly useless dropsuit armor repairers.

Small example just to show numbers. Amarr Heavy suit without modules has 680-odd armor. Prototype armor repair unit does 5 armor per second. Skills neccesary to equip this increase it by 25% to 6.4 armor per second. This heavy, if injured badly, must wait about two minutes to get back into the fight without external aid. Plus heavy stuff is 2x more expensive than equivalent light stuff, so he can't exactly just go Leeroy and remorselessly redeploy.

Also, seeing as the armor layers slow you down, maybe we could add something to the shield extenders as a negative? Easier to show up on the map, maybe larger hitbox(both of which are direct analogs from what EVE shield extenders do[raise sig radius])?

Anything to make armor and shield a bit more even, I say. Especially those utterly useless dropsuit armor repairers.

Small example just to show numbers. Amarr Heavy suit without modules has 680-odd armor. Prototype armor repair unit does 5 armor per second. Skills neccesary to equip this increase it by 25% to 6.4 armor per second. This heavy, if injured badly, must wait about two minutes to get back into the fight without external aid. Plus heavy stuff is 2x more expensive than equivalent light stuff, so he can't exactly just go Leeroy and remorselessly redeploy.

Also, seeing as the armor layers slow you down, maybe we could add something to the shield extenders as a negative? Easier to show up on the map, maybe larger hitbox(both of which are direct analogs from what EVE shield extenders do[raise sig radius])?

Its even worse because the skill for dropsuit selfrepair only works when you have a repair unit in your suit and btw it gives only a max bonus of 15%. Compare that to skill shield handling which does the same for shields (here it works without module). Dropsuit selfrepair should not be a percantage based skill but a skill on fixed value per level lets say 0.5 HP/sec. This would benefit all suitsetups regardless if they use a repairmodule.

On the first, yeah, I was a logi last build so I understand exactly how bugged the reppers are... won't lock, won't stay locked, the list goes on. As for the second, danke mein kamarad. I became a Madrugar pilot mid last build to find an AV tool to be used against Sagaris's, so I devoted alot of time into thinking how shields and armor could be leveled.

Another point I'd like to make is due to the lack of Structure, Armor appears to have taken that role where vehicles are concerned. When armor reaches 50% or lower, it begins to damage itself from the fires this sparks. A proposed solution is to add the shield penetration system of EVE (armor takes portion of damage once shields get to 20% or so) or add a structure level to assign the fire and smoke to, like how our dropsuits appear to have 1 Structure HP.

Also, as a cosmetic thing, lowering armor sparks fires and smoke. Could we have low shields give a visual indicator, like visible hive structures in areas that aren't being shot, or shimmers of distortion across the hull?

These are more vehicle related I admit, but it is still an armor and shield comparison.