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Nornagest comments on Building rationalist communities: lessons from the Latter-day Saints - Less Wrong
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What I've read of the psychology literature generally indicates that mirroring the dress sense and behavior of your target audience gets you further than adhering to some codified notion of respectability when you're trying to sell something, and that this remains true when your product is a religion.
When what you're trying to sell is status-linked, it can be useful to act one or two status levels above your target audience. But there's no clear link to status here, so I'd imagine the Mormon uniform has more to do either with intra-group signaling or with an attempt at mirroring a large cross-section of potential recruits that became fossilized sometime in the past.
This strikes me as a feature. Outside of hacker culture, recruiting people who wear collared shirts and not recruiting those that don't is a very strong strategy.
I'd imagine the problem with trying to mirror "the dress sense and behavior of your target audience" is that if you're not actually a member of that culture, you'll mess up in the details and end up looking like a clueless phony. As such you're probably better of with a generic vaguely respectable look.
That would make sense if the Mormon missionary dress code constituted a generic vaguely respectable look, but it's a lot stricter than that: more like a uniform, and distinguished from mainstream respectable in several subtle ways. (The thin black ties are what comes first to mind; I've never seen one off of a Mormon missionary or, in one case, a classmate playing Orson Scott Card.) People pick up on that; it fairly screams "outgroup", and in fact it's why we're having this conversation in the first place.
In light of this, I think I'm more inclined to buy the theory mentioned elsethread, that the missionary tradition is meant to produce loyalty in existing members rather than new recruits. If that's what you're going for, you want distinctive identifying features for your ingroup.