Hmmm.... Runes maybe Runewords??

I feel like the rune system in POE2 is ...Ok. Not great. I get that its suppose to be a substitute for whatever your missing out on from your gear but I feel like it could be better. I was thinking why not reward the user if they are able to corrupt their items with max sockets by adding additional bonuses when combining runes aka Runewords of some sort.

I havnt placed a different rune in my body armor other than increased evasion / ES / armor so there is no incentive for me to try something new as I would lose a lot of defenses. However, if there was a bonus system that gave me for example light res / cold res + (Bonus from runes) 5-10% global defenses for example by combining 3 runes that would give me more incentive to corrupt my armors for max sockets and/or try out different runes.

Runewords is the best crafting system in the genre. I'm really surprised no game ever used it since D2. Probably because it was so iconic that no one ever dared.