Unfortunately, from how I personally see it. There are currently a few massive limitations that would either de-value this feature or cause issues with it:
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Transparent items would require essentially two review processes:
Roblox doesn’t render translucent objects behind glass, so it’d very easy to hide violative content masked with a translucent layer; to prevent that, Roblox would essentially need to do two review processes; one supporting transparency and one without. -
Translucency on Roblox is expensive:
As of currently, a translucent object is quite expensive to render over its opaque counterpart, afaik. -
Roblox has less-than-ideal depth-sorting support:
If you hop into Studio right now wearing a bunch of accessories and then set every part in your character to be translucent (or even just the accessories); you’ll likely have a lot of Z-fighting. This is because Roblox doesn’t do per-pixel depth-sorting, they do it on a per-part basis; this means any translucent part that is both in-front and behind another part isn’t ever going to be able to depth-sort properly. -
Roblox doesn’t handle translucent objects well for thumbnails:
If you’ve ever owned a translucent item and decided to wear it; you’ll probably remember the white background that appears behind it if nothing else in the render is visible there. Roblox presumably limits themselves to opaque / fully-transparent avatar thumbnails and hence fills in the area behind translucent objects with a white background. -
Some developers don’t want translucent objects on player-characters:
This may be a feature-request in itself. But, developers who don’t want translucent objects in their experience for some reason won’t be able to detect that your accessory uses translucency and even if they could, they would effectively have to delete your accessory from a player’s character. There wouldn’t be any way to retrieve a version without transparency in the case the developer would rather use that. Theoretically, a developer could use an external server to analyse images to detect translucent textures; however, it would still be less-than-ideal. -
Current translucent items will be worth less:
As a disclaimer here, I own a translucent item; however, I never directly bought mine, I got it from a ‘chaser’ gift code without even knowing about it until a few years ago.
Of course, you could say this for limiteds when UGC went public, too. However, Roblox still protects the IP of those accessories. Users buying translucent accessories for the translucent effect is a bit of a different story; sure, the exact accessory would still be IP protected; however, the translucent aspect in itself wouldn’t. I know this sounds very ‘gatekeep-y’ but I still find the need to flag this as: not something to entirely stop this feature but certainly something to consider when following through with it, as to not upset anyone.
This is all I personally know about this subject. Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong or outdated on any of this!
Of course, Roblox already has translucent items made by them. However, my fear is that by having it released to the public coupled with not mitigating any of the above; it would lead to a lot more accessories being created (potentially also some with malicious intentions) all using this broken-enough technology and suffering from the exact same problems.