[quote=@VATROU]
There's no clear winner with regard to who has the better gear. 
[/quote]

I don't think there's ever really a 'winner'. There are so many billions of variables that swords and martial arts tend to balance each other out. Training helps, but when it comes down to it, 1v1 fights are a mere roll of the dice between two sets of odds. Sometimes people have drastically better odds, but two people who are really good at what they're doing, even when they're using drastically different things, is like comparing apples to oranges. Yes, some are better at their martial art than others, and that's slightly more measurable, but comparing two martial arts that have endured the test of time in order to definitively tell which one is better is kind of, well, not super plausible. There is never any guarantee that someone or something will kick ass, it's a matter of luck, fitness, (which is so impossible to measure on its own that I don't even know how D.W. can even claim to try without making asses of themselves,) skills, and so on and so forth, all the way down to the weather. All anyone can really say is that practice helps.