Some sort of armour tags system would be best, I think, but would need serious consideration in how to implement it.
Otherwise, one could add tags similar to the no longer extant 'Concealable' to armour pedia entries; or add one or even several pedia articles on a discovered environment (possibly via auto-completed research) vs allowable armours. Maybe even a whole bunch of articles that get unlocked and locked depending on your researched armour list. And potentially allowing to research looted armour without unlocking the full manufacture/buy/tech development, similar to how looted weapons work.
All of this is a lot of work for the modder for rather limited gains.
Asking for scrolling and armour tags seem much easier for the modder, but OXCE development has a giant todo list and is at a low point right now.
The overwrite was just my own laziness, AFAIK you can just !add the armours with no ill effects. The scripts were where I had trouble.
I don't understand what the 'empty inventory' issues was, exactly. Did you test in Quick Battles? And were somehow unable to equip the soldier? Or it wiped their equipment 'memory'? Something else?