The Tavern

Why not display that then?

The devs don't want to throw too many numbers at player as they do not want to encourage or require too many calculations while playing the game, or stuff like using spreadsheets, calculators, etc. They want people making decisions based on imperfect knowledge. However that sometimes stands in tension with wanting the game to be freer of spoilers.

Nonetheless Crawl has moved toward showing more info over time. Maybe it makes sense to show max damage enemies can do, maybe not, but that would be decided rather apart from considerations about helping players figure out their GDR effects.

GDR changed a ton between 0.5 and 0.8...

My point is that we don't need another rebalancing period when armour is already okay.

Removing GDR will move Crawl a bit closer to a well-designed game.

Really? I must have forgotten. Or never noticed.