In my opinion, this kind of thing was good and useful in TFC, but in FF has become overpowered. Which doesn't seem too far off most every other post here
Yes, the main issue is there is no downside to it, not the fact that it's possible... Armour strip may not be the entire reason, but I do think it's a major factor.
For example, the TFC servers I played on (.id's) used it as standard. As a result, people boosted across the map were generally easier to kill - by SG, sniper, shotty blasts, all of the above etc. - even pipe traps were more effective because they didn't have to do so much damage to kill, and could thus be spread over a wider area.
In all honesty, I think that should really be the first thing to try. Making a radical change has too much potential pitfalls, whereas this is something that has been tried and tested in a similar environment. It's a good place to start from, if you get what I mean.
It's also something I've wondered if it's possible to enable (in an extremely hacky way) in Lua. I may experiment for the hell of it...