You can easily reach the armor cap with Light armor. And though heavy armor has the perk that allows a 10% chance to reflect damage back to your opponent it still hurts you in the process while with Light armor you have a 10% chance to outright avoid damage. With the perk that regenerates your stamina by 50% you can sprint more often, do shield bash and power attacks more often, and use eagle eye more often as well. Allowing you to do more damage. And you can sneak with light armor as well, something you can barely do with heavy armor. And Light armor is even more useful to spell casters than heavy armor is.

So not only can you soak up just as much damage with Light armor as you can with Heavy armor(more so thanks to deft movement) but you can dish out more damage as well. With that in mind what exactly does heavy armor even have going for it? Melee damage? Whoop de do! >_>. The less damage you take when falling is useless especially if you have the shout that allows you to become ethereal since then you are outright immune to fall damage no matter how high you fall from. Thus making that perk useless as well.

So with a melee perk that does not come in handy at all due to there being no hand to hand combat tree, a cushioned falling perk that is made useless by Ethereal shout, and a reflective blows that comes short when compared to deft movement since you still take damage, all it really have going for it is...oh right 50% less stagger. Which falls short to 50%+ stamina regeneration since you can do a hell of a lot more damage with it.

So with that in mind, is the heavy armor tree useless? Would it not be better to just get light armor no matter what your playing as? Since it would obviously be much more useful to a tank, mage, ranger, assassin, etc to use Light armor than it would be to use Heavy armor wouldn't it?

It is not useless, it is just not better than Light Armor.

Armor in this game comes down to looks and role. Any material except maybe Fur and Leather can reach the Cap depending on Perks and Skill combos. With the right Perks, Heavy Armor does not encumber you, so there is no real performance reason to choose one armor over the other one.

Wear what you like or what your role demands.

But light armor looks ugly and makes you look effeminate, not that there is anything wrong with it. That's reason enough to go with Heavy. If you like the look of light armor, I won't judge you.

I will extend your argument further. What's the point of armor? They all look ugly and it's stupid. All you need is Dragonhide. A spell doesn't weigh anything, and give you better protection than any armor can give you, and you don't have to waste perks in smithing or light-armor or heavy-armor, which is just waste of perks. With the perk that regenerate stamina when you use healing spells, you can do many many shield bashes without trying. Light armor is completely useless.

I am being facetious, of course. Some may prefer heavy armor. Some may prefer light armor. Some may prefer no armor. There are advantages and disadvantages to each style. People always forget about the no armor choice, which is a perfectly valid choice.

While there are some interesting perks in Heavy Armor...and Light Armor for that matter, when it comes time to spend the points I seem to have another taking priority.

The end result has been that none of my characters, since January, have spent perk points in either.

EDIT: It's like CCNA suggests. It really comes down to what you want to wear. For me, it's what looks good for my current character. That results in me always mixing heavy, light and clothing, anyway.

In the long run Light Armor is just a good, better even, the heavy armor if you're looking at it purely stat wise. As a duel wield I've tried both, stuck with it long enough to hit the cap a few times and I prefer to use heavy armor. I use less perks to reach the cap, I have more defense then light at the lower levels, and I have to say I like the styles of the heavy sets more.

Yep. This is how Heavy armor should have been implemented: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1OlbMwykMY

I don't always feel like maxing smithing or using alchemy, so heavy armor does me just fine. Besides, I like taking less fall damage.

I'd say Heavy Armour gets much more interesting perks, Fists of Steel while not incredible is certainly useful, as is Cushioned, and Tower of Strength, especially with Force Without Effort, just seems really great. So, that's three perks that I like, compared to in the Light Armour tree where there's only really Wind Walker.

Plus, I'd have to say, when it comes to Smithing, Heavy Armour gets the better looking craftable sets of armour.

Heavy Armor is a lot better than Light Armor for melee classes at "low" levels. It's cool to say that it's easy to max the armor rating with Light Armor, but it only happen through voluntary min/maxing and the top tier Light Armors. So it eventually happens, yes, but not before lots of hours of play. And it's easier to max the armor rating with Heavy Armor and any heavy armor set you like for aesthetics.