Hey leave my halberds and bardiches out of this!! (Yeah I know I didn't spell check)
I know the feeling. I used to do the Exceptional Polearm BODs for POF, now I have to bribe them all to 20 count to get POF
AGAIN, Oreo can't seem to understand that there is that pesky "Exceptional" point component, that is 100 to 200 (depending on crafting skill), that is what is raising that 20 Ex Polearm to the same value as a 20 normal iron Plate LBOD. NOTHING is arbitrary about LBODs. But, "Arbitrary" is pretty much the DEFINITION of small BODs that don't require colored wood, metal or leather.
The system was designed that way FIFTEEN YEARS AGO because trying to factor in additional special bonuses for additional material would have complicated the programming to where it would likely have been AoS before BODs could have been finished. It's why there were never Dragon Scale Armor BODs. It's why a Bone Armor Small BOD (that you can't make 100% even with a 30% exceptional talisman, IIRC) is worth the same as a 10-count bandana.
Special cases are a pancake to program for - and an even more painful thing to debug.
When I was taking programming classes in college in 1985, I had my final program done except for one subroutine to handle a special case - a special form of output (printing a check) from data that could read and out perfectly fine from all the other subroutines. The software worked perfectly without the subroutine. The subroutine worked perfectly with a "test program" that used dummy commands EXACTLY like what was in the main program to call it.
I brought the two together, and the main program stopped working. It didn't start back working when I took the subroutine out. It didn't work even when I reverted to a backup copy from before I did the insert. The DUMMY program stopped working. There was no change to the data, so it couldn't have been an accidental data overwrite. MY PROFESSOR couldn't even figure out what caused it, as he had someone take my printouts, retype the damn thing (all 1000+ lines of it), and it worked. But it would NOT work for me, EVER on my mainframe account. Not even the next year, when I was given a copy of the teacher's retyping of it, that worked fine for him.