About resistance penalty (bad design choice?)

I cannot convince myself that resistance penalty is a good thing for the game.
It just breaks character progression and it has a bad UI implementation.

Why has it been implemented?
What goal does it serve?

I'm pretty sure the game could be balanced without it.
With of combination of, for example:
- lowering resistance attributes magnitude on gear
- adjusting monsters elemental damage during acts
- Allowing an upper max resistance limit

What do you think about this "feature"?
Would you change it to something else?

For better or worse POE does a lot of things "because diablo did it".

It's a gear check. They need people finding items with bigger numbers on it to help them pace the game and get players to find new gear.

Personally, I think it's arbitrary, doesn't enhance the gameplay flavor for us to have to worry about 4 random numbers of resist, and it would be more fun if they just combined them into one single magic resist and added more interesting mechanics for survivability.

I wrote a post on it here:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3626451

But to some degree you can't fault them for chasing what's been "Tried and true" for so many years. This genre needs gear checks, and though we could argue this is boring and unfun item mechanics, they do serve a purpose.

Could that purpose be fulfilled in more fun and exciting ways? Yes. But this is the path they chose.