I think people will begin to like the uniform when they see the real thing. However, I do agree metal wings would of been nice.
The white part of the hat is actually a type of bonded rubber, so it will clean very easily. They did a lot of testing with it. Also the uniform was designed with a large amount of pilot input. They made many changes based on early testing from groups of pilots. Also when you look at the survey's many of them were sitting right in the 50/50 mark of what pilots wanted, so the designer was always going to have a hard time pleasing everyone. The actual quality and cut of the uniforms is a huge improvement also.