I posted the remaining code to restrict by slot over in the extended+ forum so we'll just have to wait and see, unless someone wants to add a list of allowed slots to the ruleset for every single equipable item in all of Piratez.
In the meantime it's quite easy to add, remove, or rearrange equipment slots in the ruleset, so I went ahead and toyed with a proof of concept.
It works, sort-of, as seen in the first image, but it's basically just a couple more spots to put anything you want for now.
The bigger issue now, I think, is that many gear items are simply to large to make small slots for them. For my demo I used type 1 slots (holds 1 item of any size) which take up a lot of space. Hypothetically if we did use my layout, someone would need to go through all the soldier images and shift each one about 8 pixels over. That wouldn't be too difficult, but whoever had to do it might very well break down and just start crying after a few hundred of them. I wouldn't blame them.
A better solution might be to shrink the graphics for the gear items themselves, especially since many of them aren't all that big anyway. Also, as you can see in my images, the text on top of gear slots is optional, though I still don't really like the idea of putting brown boxes all over the beautiful outfit art.
A more ambitious implementation would be to add a 'hidden' option to gear slots as well as a 'behind' option. Hide the squares (more accurately, don't draw them) and let players seem to put the gear items directly on the soldier, with the back-slot items rendering behind (before) the soldier image. Then scale/edit gear items graphics to match the soldier image. That way when you put a bra on a gal, it looks like she's just wearing the bra. (Changes to render order might be more then Meridian would allow.)
As an added bonus it would look absolutely hilarious for a male slave wearing a bra over his superman outfit! As for the height difference there'd have to be 2 versions of some of the slots with one blocked off by fixed weapons, though the fakes could be transparent for slots that are already invisible.
If there's interest in my more ambitious idea, I'm game for attempting to figure out the CE+ code to make it work. Assuming it's not already there...