To preface, Varlamore looks exciting and I'm glad everything passed the way it did for the most part.
However I think it's a worthy cause to not have the new prayer melee armour be a direct upgrade to Proselyte in order to reduce power creep.
So what I'm proposing is: What if Sunfire armour had lower defence bonuses than proselyte but kept the higher prayer bonus. Themetically speaking, using the armour would be the player keeping more faith in the gods than the defensive nature of the armour.