In almost every setting where the player is able to choose what enchantments go on their armor, both survival and pvp, the player will opt for the generic Protection enchantment over any others. Once in a blue moon you'll see someone with Projectile Prot, or Blast Prot against a Wither (though it's hardly necessary). And there's a good reason people make this choice -- there's absolutely no use for anything else.
Normal Protection grants a maximum 64% resistance against literally everything except starvation, and there really isn't any threat in the game that is so great that someone would need the 80% resistance granted by replacing a Prot IV with Blast/Fire/Proj Prot IV, and it wouldn't be worth the loss of that 16% general resistance the Prot IV provided.
Combative encounters in the game could be much more dynamic if the normal Protection enchantment simply didn't work on everything. Protection should only be effective against melee attacks. Optionally, you could rename it "Contact Protection" or something, but I'm not sure it's necessary. If this change were implemented, there would be an immediate improvement to combat; instead of having a single optimal setup that you have to fight with and against, there would be interesting choices concerning which damage sources to try to protect against, and which weapons to bring to counter your enemy's defenses.
Now, there are a few concerns one might have about this change -- one might say there are just too many damage types for removing the generalist enchantment to be reasonable; or, what about protection against magic damage?
To the first concern, I think this could be mitigated a bit by combining Fire and Blast into one enchantment: Combustion Protection. And for the second concern, the addition of Magic Prot would be fantastic. The end result is still four Protection enchantments that now encompass all common damage sources, and which would create an interesting environment for strategy by removing a single optimal choice.
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