No, it brings a ton of replay value and has a perfectly good reason to be here. It is not a perfect system, there are flaws for example the drastic differnce between farming, say the Escalation protocol armor set and the Vex Offensive armor set. The latter of which can be infinitely farmed and is commonly dropped while the former is so insanely slow and cannot be farmed to the point where you'd never realstically drop a set with good stats and the preffered element. Therefore there should be a comproimise. Removing elemental affinity is NOT the solution, a middleground is. It doesn't hurt the variety in builds it adds another layer of choice and replaybility however it doesnt work for ALL armor. I dont know what the perfect solution is, maybe a costly resource you can farm from Master mode nightfalls/hunts/raids and so on which is 1-time use to change the element to what you want. Or maybe somthing completely different - I cant tell for sure but removing them altogether would be a mistake.