The Disguise Generator, to my understanding as someone who's never written a story, is meant to serve one purpose: To make the mission work with established canon, thus protecting the people using it.

Example: Jay and Acacia mostly used Uruk-hai disguises in the Original Series because they could believably kill Fellowship members in-story where members of other races most likely wouldn't.

The Disguise Generator is not meant to grant crazy-overpowered abilities (although it can). It's not meant to experiment with a new body (although that's a fun aspect of writing it). Its purpose is to make the mission work with canon and not attract attention: That is, to disguise the Agents in question.

I admit that I'm somewhat guilty of exploiting the DORKS. Valon disguised himself as a Dalek once.

The key thing is, what Valon relies on is his wits. And just because he's been given a stronger body doesn't necessarily mean he'll be any better at fighting; even if he were disguised as, I don't know, an Ork, his aim wouldn't be any better and he'd still be really clumsy with a weapon.

He prefers to leave the actual combat (when it's necessary) to Kala, and relies on trickery and guile to deal with his problems.

And the DORKS can actually be part of that. In the mission I mentioned, Valon disguises himself as a Dalek not to fight, but to get the attention of a whole bunch of fake Daleks and lure them into a trap. Instead of using the DORKS as a blunt instrument of pain, he uses it to augment his trickery.

The decision of what disguise to use, or even to use one at all, can serve many roles in a mission. They can reveal an agent's opinions on the culture(s) they're about to enter, or even whole aspects of their personality they couldn't express in their regular body. (Hemlock, anyone?) Following from this, it allows the chance for discussion, or even outright disagreement, between the partners, which can potentially feed into a plot throughout the mission.

But best of all, locking your agents into a single disguise for the extent of the mission places a restriction on you as the writer. As Mark Rosewater says, restrictions breed creativity, forcing you to come up with clever solutions to any unseen problems the disguise leads to. Especially in crossovers: do you pick something that appears in both worlds, but may not be optimal in either? Something unique to only one of the worlds, and force the agents to be extra cautious in the other?

Now the DORKS? Yeah, I do consider that overpowered. It pretty much removes all the narrative strengths above by giving the agents a free, easy solution to any disguise related problem. That's why I chose long ago never to give my agents one. In fact, I'm going to start having my agents collect a set of costumes they can use when only their fashion needs to change. More restrictions! More creativity!

—doctorlit wrote this outdoors and kept passing out in the heat; many odd squiggle words had to be backspaced away.

I think what DCCCV said is certainly part of it. Yes, the Disguise Generator can certainly be overpowered - but, since we're the ones writing the stories, we have the responsibility to avoid that. Very similar, in fact, to the TARDIS. Doctor Who episodes that are poorly written do tend to overpower the Doctor by overpowering the TARDIS or sonic screwdriver. Or, say, giving a secondary character the power to rewrite the memory of the entire species of Daleks, making an abs-- *ahem* Er, sorry, got a bit off topic there.

Point is, almost anything can make the agents in a fic overpowered. That's why good writing is imperative - write the Disguise Generator well is part of writing a PPC team well.

To my knowledge, it is entirely possible to use The Disguise generator for that, but that is not the DORKS' intended purpose. You could definitely use it to keep yourself in optimal shape, and that would make for a great character flaw. Why have you brought this subject up, exactly? If you are going to be exploiting this, the DORKS may need to be changed, but if you will not be, I assume that no one else would. It's an integral part of what makes this organization The PPC, like The Pokeball to Pokemon, or the TARDIS to Doctor Who.