TDK suit rocks, if you closely at it, it is cloth with modular armor pieces on top of it. The chest piece, rib pieces, and stomach pieces of armor are designed to move so that when he leans over and crouches the armor is flexible, yet still bullet proof.
In the end, a pure cloth suit versus an armored suit come down to how you want to view Batman. Either Batman is the world's best ninja, in which case he needs cloth and his defense is to not be seen. OR Batman is an excellemtn martial artist, detective, etc and has to survive in many-versus-one fights where he will likely get hit. In this case, he needs armor. In the most extreme cases where he is guarunteed to come under fire, we see the armored suited in the comics (not unlike iron man, who just walks into bullets).
So, I think Nolan is a realist, in the sense that he acknolwedges that a pure-ninja style Batman wearing nothing but cloth is not going to survive when fighting gangs who are armed with all sorts of guns -- so Batman needs some armor, but still light weight enough to be stealthy, and the result is the suit we see in TDK, and the suit we saw in BB.
In regards to all other batman films, I would say their suits were more sensational rather than grounded in any form of practicality (e.g the rigid body armor, nippes, etc). All films prior to BB, did not have a sense of realism to them, they were sensalationalist films that depicted Batman in a more fantasy world, with Penguin-like men, unexplained cat-woman powers, and other fun villians like that. They were live-action cartoons.
. I love how japanese just take everything over the top. 
