Having played more with the system It's growing on me nicely. It's perfectly possible to reproduce bonuses from before the patch, you just can't do it on a single item. That +40 farming from a druid robe for example will need to spread across a full wardrobe, but now we also have the capability to add +40 marksmanship/survival/exploration etc via a dedicated wardrobe.
I think there's still a lot of room for tweaking/expanding and some of the affinities make very little sense to me right now but in general the system is quite fun to play with.