Yeah... whomever the designer is (don't remember her name, and given her baseless decision-making skills, certainly not important enough in my mind to waste a single byte of space in my brain to do so)...
Regine or Sakkarah, whichever is fine though I prefer Sakkarah
...that made the decision to use the Samurai Empire "Hey We've Got To Throw In Something For Every Subset of the Game, Let's Do Bonsai With A Cheap Version of Gardening" Code instead of just going ahead and making a second plant system that was at least as dynamic as the first (since apparently 5th gen plants are never coming) is far beyond me.
We didn't HAVE to throw in anything. Since I was doing the cocoa trees (that we had promised a few months back), I decided to add a few more plants while at it. This has already been answered before, and in the FOF, there was no time planned in the schedule for gardening. What you would like to see would take way more time than what our very busy schedule currently allows.
I mean, honestly, how hard can cutting, pasting, and dropping in new values actually be?
Extremely considering that would not do what you were hoping for. Again, as stated in the FOF, it's not just a matter of copy pasting and tweaking a few numbers.
Why don’t the plants self-pollinate to produce seeds?
"This was a design decision. While the code is complex (way more than just telling it new vs. old), it wouldn’t take too much time to allow the plants to produce seeds. "
As you appropriately put in bold it WAS a design decision not to allow the new plants to produce seeds. And I stand by that decision, even more now in view of the general reaction to the new plants. Some players have individually grown over 200 plants in the first week. By the time the plants stop producing seeds, each of these players will have in excess of 1600 seeds sitting on their plants to be harvested whenever. Why even bother hunting for the seeds anymore?
To this, some of you will reply "I'm a crafter, I shouldn't have to hunt for this". And again I disagree. Don't you have to hunt to get barbed leather? Peerless ingredients? Serpent & dragon scales? Bones? Why shouldn't gardeners also have a portion of the plants they can produce require a certain amount of hunting? My scribe cannot pump out a billion scrappers a day because I need to do peerless bosses and hope they will drop the ingredients I'm missing. Or I can just go buy them from someone else and hope the scrappers I make will have the mods I needed so I can resell for a profit instead of a loss. It's part of the risk any merchant needs to deal with.
I understand some of you are not pleased with this decision, but it will not change. The peculiar seeds WILL NOT produce seeds.
About the fire color...
As Jeremy stated in the FOF, it was as much of a surprise to us as it was to you. While we didn't actually want to have any of these new plants colored, unless other actually significant issues occur, we will not be changing this and consider it as an Easter egg instead.
About sugar canes, hops and all that jazz...
As we have stated before, while the new plants will not self-pollinate, we are hoping to add resources to some of them in the future. So it isn't random that I renamed the bamboo sugar canes. But as you all know, we have been and will continue to be very busy in the foreseeable future and gardening is not on the official schedule. So I'm not going to make any promises or give any kind of ETA on anything. Just know that we do want to do more with the new plants and that they have been set up in a way that it would give us more flexibility to add new features to them when time will permit.