I feel like game mechanic opaqueness only encourages a wide range of player builds. While you can change things and ultimately see how effective builds are just by exploring and using them on a server... It would be a different community if we can whittle down all builds to just 1 per class that are "OBVIOUSLY MOAR 1337 THAN URS" with mathz.
Player diversity is good.
I know ignorance is bliss, but we are not talking about a complete damage calculation formula being displayed on screen, just a final damage value like every other rpg-ish game gives you, which is helpful in judging the game balance and understanding the difference in damage types etc. And I do believe we should be able to judge the game balance for ourselves and not have too much faith in the arbitrariness of balancers and admins, who want exclusive rights, information and an advantage over the peasantry. The fact that your post got upvoted by an admin/balancer speaks for itself.
Claiming that damage display decreases the variety in builds is just nonsense. If by "variety" you mean builds that are bad at what they were meant to be good at, then maybe lol. Other than that, damage isn't everything and nobody is going to play max damage melee, because he suddenly realises he can do more damage with a 2h axe than as a horse archer, or that higher athletics surprisingly comes at the expense of damage potential...
I care to know, for example, how higher damage throwing weapons and bows perform against medium to heavy armor, because the advertised item damage stats have very little to do with how much damage they really do. At the moment, high damage ranged weapons are utterly useless and I do want to have some real info here.
And btw nobody will know the details of how to make a good build by "exploring" it on the servers... Let's say I want to know whether a horse archer is better with 8 PD instead of 7 or with 4 HA instead of 3. I can play a hundred gens to find out and will never know, because random and unknown (speed bonus, enemy armor, Str and IF...) components are much too high.