In the stress test this morning I decided to mess around with transmutation.
I bought the cultural armour for my Sylvari (cleaned me out -_-) to see if higher level gears appearance could be transmuted with lower gear stats. Success! I could wear sexy armour with stats for my level.. I thought this was pretty cool! (after doing it I quickly googled to see if there were many results.. there were a few.. oh well XD)
However, this opened my eyes to the fact that the majority of the cultural armour for the Sylvari looks poorly done, final tier is OK but by that point you'll have nicer high end gear anyway. I hopped on my Norn and looked at it's equivalents.. the detail is just beautiful. It's not enough to deter me from picking a Sylvari.. I'm still allowed to be a little disappointed though.