Flavor- there's a ton of ways to customize the armor, plus hack packs made by the community, and a 3DS plugin (sans aforementioned packs). The armor actually consists of up to 16 models (each of which you choose from a list of 24-82 options, in vanilla) and six color layers, in which you can change the reflectivity as well as color, and come stocked with proper textures.
That's to say nothing of the fact that I or anyone else can open up the vanilla campaign and insert into the 'canon' universe, plus being usable online without errors (as long as the server has that module, clients don't have problems, and many have a script that removes god-items from starting characters).
Plus, there's absolutely nothing stopping me from making proper flavor text, which causes it to make sense within the campaign, or even a sidequest, etc. I could easily throw a book into the early loot tables that tells of the mythical dragon armor.
And you're attacking me for not balancing it? I can balance it easily. That was just a 60-second demonstration deal. It sounds like I could in fact add this armor (granted, not having added thoughtfully balanced stats) to the campaign faster than it takes a lot of people to download the Dragon Age DLC, from what I hear.
tl;dr: I do not, nor does anyone else need to pay money -especially for a single item- to have balanced, flavor armor that exists in the canon. Hell, I could add one of the example artifacts from my 3.5 book that's lying around, if I wanted to.