My barbaric warrior does wear Savior's hide, beside her Hide armor and Fur armors (not the bikini ones btw).
For improving her armor ratio, she trained her smithing to the max and has create an improved smithing outfit with the help of enchanting, so she's able to improve non perk outfit to a decent level.
To improve her armor ratio even more she has trained Alternation so she can use the flesh spells. She can use Ironflesh now with only the basic amount of magica and her Gauldur amulet. With the stability perk it gives her 80pts extra armor rating for 90 seconds.
Third thing is Block. She keeps improving that over the Bash perks side, because her main weapon is a twohander.
The Lord stone and the Temple of Mara questline (and the Savior's hide itself ) give some extra defense against magic attacks. Savior's hide gives also resistance toward poison attacks.
She has also some points in Restoration to cheapen (basis row) and improve (Regeneration) her heals.
Her best defense is the offense though. Her hard hitting big sword makes short work of most regular opponents. Bashing, moving and hiding fills up the gap when against stronger opponents. Charging wonders against archers and pesky magicians
From the start she goes on Master difficulty and has reached level 55 now. At the moment her main weapons are a sword and a board to improve her One Handed skill. Only when against very strong opponents she still draws her big sword. To keep some challenge in it, she has exchanged her Dragon swords for Skyforge ones and has send her follower home. Her board is an improved Hide shield.
That Hide shield is indeed for RP reasons, It's the only not sophiticated looking light shield. As said above her defense is mainly offense so wielding a big heavy shield doesn't fit. She uses her shield mainly to bash and stagger her opponents, especially casters and archers. Also going to dual wield with her is still on my shortlist, sword-sword or sword-dagger.
Btw, With Ironflesh running her Armor rating is already 700+. I don't know how Armor rating is working exactly, but there seems to be some sort of cap at 600 or so, so I doubt if more Armor rating from a better shield is very usefull.