I hate how item balance is completely non existent at the moment. Like medium vs heavy armor. At time when you get only a few Heavy armors randomly here and there you lose 25% dodge but gain like 5 or 10 to armor and 1 deflection. It is not worth it. My tanks get blown up by enemy burst fire like they are not there. On the other hand Argenta can stand there in light armor and rarely get hit by anyone in her light armor with bonus dodge and focus on dodge. She even has the item that lets her parry melee attacks with ranged weapons which means even those enemies do nothing to her. Even worse at same time she has like 30% armor, Abelard has 50% armor and 1 deflection but gets hit easily by ranged attacks and suffers a lot of damage that way..
Also I got Pasqal heavy armor proficiency but then found 50% armor medium armor.. so why would I want to lose dodge for no gain?!
Idk how it is at other difficulty levels, but from my experience playing on unfair, right now being near the end of ch2, medium armors are dogshit, you either go full armor stacking or full dodge stacking for defense. Elite enemies will regularly have 100%+ armor pen and dodge reduction so anything below that is mostly worthless. I have my main as assassin with 165 dodge before all his buffs, and he'll still be hit quite often by elite/commander enemies. My Heinrix/Pasqal/Abelard have ~65-80% armor pre buffs, and one of the buffs is shield of the emperor that I always have up before any of the enemies move, which brings my goons to around 100% armor. They generally will shrug off hits from lesser enemies, but elite/commander can still oneshot them on first turn, tho by the end of 2nd I have armour stacked to ~160+ and they start being very tanky against elites too. I had Argenta in medium armor, so she had neither super high dodge (around 90-100) nor armor (50) and she was dying whenever any enemy looked at her, so now I'm building her toward heavy armour too.
Overall imho both dodge/armour are decent, as long as you focus one hard, the difference is that armour is much easier to stack in combat, so heavily armored character can be immortal by turn ~3, while my dodgy char is always at *some* risk of getting oneshot, but that's ok since dodge also works as a damage stat on him (lethality)