Hi there,
my memory is not the best around.
But the key to this is the new blacksmith menu that was introduced around AOS.
Before you used whatever ingot you had in backpack,if you had more than one colour you got a cursor to choose the pile you wanted.Actually it is working like this for clothes for tailors.
Now you can only make smith items with the colours stated in the list,same goes for smelting.
But if you are using a tinker,making thongs for instance, you will use whatever ingot you have in your backpack...at least one guy from shard of the braves have lost rare ingots this way.
Regards
The Scandinavian