Oh, come one. But they're talking just of the inherent bonus and not the overall value (inherent + normal).
Of course they are, when it comes to sorting which five pieces count toward the inherent bonus. I've never tried to claim otherwise. But imbued LMC is still going to be on every serious suit, and this is going to make it way more complicated to figure out how much of it you need.
Ok, I can see now, what your examples were about. And yes, your interpretation would be horribly confusing and needlessly overcomplicated. But in my opinion, that's just a misconception.
A misconception about what? Armor gets inherent LMC based on material, but in any given suit only the five pieces with the most inherent LMC actually count. That's pretty unambiguously how it works, right? So let's consider once more the case of Joe Newbie.
Currently Joe is wearing a Helm of Insight, a Heart of the Lion, and some Leggings of Bane. His gorget, gloves, and sleeves are all studded leather. But he sees a nice bone helm with some properties he wants sitting on a vendor. It has 6 LMC listed on it among other things, and Joe wants to know how wearing it will change his LMC total.
Right now in order to answer that question accurately all he has to know is that 6 is 2 points less than 8.
Under the proposed system he needs to know the LMC bonuses inherent to each type of material and the fact that the mage armor property on his Heart of the Lion plate chest means that it counts as leather. He has to add the inherent LMC on the bone helm to the visible LMC listed on it, and compare that to the LMC on his current helmet. Well 6 visible plus 3 inherent is 9, so even though the new helmet has 2 points less LMC listed on it, he actually gains 1 point of LMC. Hooray. Except he also has to remember that he was getting a 1 point bonus from each of his metal pieces, so actually it's a wash and his LMC is unchanged. I actually forgot that last bit the first time and had to come back and edit it into the post.
Do you see the difference? Devs? This is HORRIBLY overcomplicated.
But wait, you say, all Joe Newbie will REALLY need to do is look at the property counter being added to the client!
And yeah, that will tell him his current LMC, but it won't explain all that crap above about some helmet he might want to buy from a vendor. It won't tell him anything about an item he might plan to craft. And if he doesn't understand WHY his helmet makes his LMC go up by 8 when it only has 6 LMC listed on it, yet somehow adds 9 when he puts it on a different character? All that property counter is going to tell him is "Hey man this game does not make sense!"
Just wait until he changes to plate arms, gloves, and gorget with a total of 24 LMC imbued on them and his handy new display tells him his LMC total only went up by 18. Man we can barely hash this out here and we're hardcore types on the forum. To the average slob, LMC is going to become voodoo.