Skill Gem Holders to decouple sockets from gems

In POE 1, gems were socketed in gear. This caused a number of problems. Often times you had to forego gear upgrades because they had the wrong number/color of sockets, or the wrong links. Which sucked.

POE 2 had promised to solve this by removing gem sockets from gear and having the system be separate. In the new system, each gem has a number of sockets in which support gems can be placed. This system fixed at least one problem. By decoupling gems from gear, gear upgrades were no longer gated by gem links/colors. However, it's introduced another problem.

In the old system, you could swap in different gems if you wanted. i.e. Lightning Arrow, Ice Shot, Tornado Shot, etc. In the same six-link, you could swap one in for the other and try them out. In the new system, this falls apart because the sockets are directly attached to the gem. If you have a "6-linked" Lightning Arrow gem and want to swap it / try out a different skill, that skill also has to be 6-linked or it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

One suggestion to make this better was to make the sockets/links character-bound instead of directly linked to the gems. The reason they attached sockets/links to gems instead of to the character though, I assume, was to make it tradeable.

You could fix this problem by instead having another equippable component that the gems socket into. (A gem holder of sorts). Then, you use the jeweller orbs on the gem holder to add sockets. Each char can equip x gem holders, one per skill. You could limit it by progression, unlocking more as you level. Add them to the drop pool, you could give them attributes (+level of socketed gems, or socketed gems also deal x% increased fire damage or something). Maybe even have unique ones, or special fancy ones (similar to transfigured gems in POE 1. When socketed with Lightning Arrow, change the behavior of lightning arrow).

That way they're still tradeable, yet decoupled from the actual gems.