The idea for artifacts here is to have basically equipment, but ones that are attached to other artifacts instead of creatures.

I always wanted a term to describe permanents/objects that have permanents attached to them - a generelization of "enchanted", "equipped" e. g. "Destroy target adorned permanent."

"Attached" is just a too mechanical term that I want to avoid in card text like "stack" and "zone".

The problem with that is that the various cards that are attached to objects have a wide variety of flavor reasons behind them so finding a single term to describe that quality of being attached or having attached permanents is hard.

I think "adorned" was used as a pseudo keyword for a creature that was enchanted and/or equipped, but there it can be seen how specific the flavor ends be. It wouldn't be a fit for Component artifacts and probably not for Fortifications either. Nor for Curses.

Hmm, oh, you even mentioned that "adorned". Yeah it was used in that Norse set in planesculptors at one point or another.

Anyway, while "attached" is a pretty sterile word, it doesn't bring up all the confusion the term "stack" has related to it. So it's even used for reminder texts of Auras and such without any major issues as far as I know.

Personally I don't see this as a large enough of a problem to call for a modification.