I think the best way for an armor system is to rely on its graphics. Instead of having a billion names, I think the shape/color should have an influence on how defensively strong the armor is. You could either base it on shape, which making a million types of armor sounds annoying, or you can have a scale. The cold colors, or dark colors will be low levels, and the warm hot colors will be high level. Such as, a violet is level 20 and a red is level 45. I don't know how effective that would be, but if you had a color scale like this:
That would be an example, so instead of memorizing prefixes, you just learn the color values, and you know automatically what levels they are, and how strong they are. You could have blue colors for mages, red for warriors, green for archers, ect.
What would be cool is if you actually made each armor different and just put a 4x4 pixel block of one of those colors to tell how good it is. This in return you could press r and go to armor info tab (once created) and check how strong that color is.. Just a thought.