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I can think of a lot of things that would make items better that wouldn’t be too hard to implement.

*Level-scaling of item powers*: Items start small but gain in ability over time. This makes your father’s enchanted sword reasonably balanced at low levels but not completely obsolete at high levels. This means that you don’t end up feeling like a chump for continuing to use it.
*Merging Items*: Characters gain the ability to merge items together. For instance, lower power items can be merged into a composite item.
*Attunement For Weaker Items Goes Away*: Make attunement dependent on level some way so that some items lose that requirement for higher level characters or that higher level characters can obtain more.

Of course a lot of this would be helped by having an actual item creation ruleset, but 5E blew that off. I’m sure they’ll not do a good one in the upcoming rulebook.

I stand by every word.

Honestly I like having a combination of items. The items with broad appeal are usually less interesting by themselves. The flame tongue sword is cool but it’s just a flaming sword. You get to deal more fire damage with it.
If your players are the kind of players to scream blue murder at loosing magic items then just don’t give them that. No magic item appeals to everyone, as this conversation clearly shows. If the book had nothing but magic items you liked I’m sure that’d leave someone else disliking the majority of magic items.
That’s my favourite thing about the 5E books so far is the variety. You don’t like it, fine, don’t use it.

I freely grant that you CAN hang a story off of the wizard suddenly being stronger than the fighter, and in some groups this story will even be fun. You may also be in a group where a magic item can go to a player for “a few sessions” and not cause a bloody revolt when those few sessions come to an end. Neither of those have been my experience with D&D. Do we want the DMG’s magic items to be designed for stories that are interesting once and repetitive the second time, or do we want magic items that have broad appeal?

Yeah, that’s a fair point. But it’s also why I don’t roll for stats! (Unless it’s a one-off session)

But there’s another face to this. Remember, in the 1st edition of the game, all attributes were randomly rolled, using the 3d6 method. This sometimes resulted in a fighter with a measly Strength of 11 — or someone who rolled an 18, then rolled percentile dice and got a 97! (Which happened to me, in one campaign — randomly rolling attributes, going down STR/INT/WIS/DEX/CON/CHA, I got 18/97, 6, 15, 17, 3 and 12. Great stats for a fighter — until you hit that 3 CON…)

So imagine you have two fighters, who both randomly rolled their stats. One rolled 11, 9, 12, 14, 13, 5. The other one rolled 18/67, 11, 7, 16, 15, 10. Mathematically, the first fighter is far inferior to the second — and his player might decide, justifiably, that his character would be better off going back to farming, and he (the player) finding something else to do with his Friday nights. (There’s always the bar, and maybe finding female companionship…)

In this case, stat-increasing items serve to decrease the gap between a mediocre character and a superlative one. With Gauntlets of Ogre Power, the first character becomes a powerhouse like the second one, which helps the party out.

Also, keep in mind that the Gauntlets are ITEMS — items can be taken away from the character. And in 1st edition, the magic item tables were random; there was no guarantee of finding the legendary Gauntlets in your character’s lifetime.

During one of my characters’ lifetime, he never saw the Gauntlets or any stat-increasing item (like the Manual of Bodily Health — a book which, when read and followed for a month, permanently increased your Constitution by 1). But he got a Strength of 24. How? The potion miscibility table. He’d found a potion of Storm Giant Strength (Strength 24) at one point, and a Potion of Super-Heroism. He drank both (it was an emergency situation and I was hoping I’d roll lucky enough for both potions to work). Roll — 00. And the potion of Giant Strength was the one that was permanently applied. Lucky, yes — and an illustration of a way to permanently increase your Strength. (Couldn’t be taken from me, and the DM also decided that it couldn’t be magically dispelled or negated, like the Gauntlets could be if someone used a Rod of Negation on them.

The funny thing? The character already had a Strength of 18/75…

In the specific example of two fighters that arrange their stats differently, there is at least the possibility of Bob getting a Cloak of Charisma (not that Cloaks of Charisma are in the DMG, but whatever) to match or surpass Alice’s previously-superior Cha. Or doing something else with his three attunement slots – there’s a lot of opportunity cost involved.

Having said that, well, you know my views already. =) I’m glad you like this proposal!