When killing dragons was much more difficult, barbed leather was more valuable.
When valorite was worth 100 per ingot or more, a valorite plate suit of armor was worth a lot.
As a crafter you wanted to fail as little as possible so as not to waste those resources.
I think SP has skewed your concept of materials value. While I agree you want to fail as little as possible, the situation is actually far worse than you think, on the shards where stuff can be transferred away to Atlantic by a speculator.
Valorite hasn't been below 100 GP per ingot on most shards since before SE; On many shards it's up around 500+ per ingot - if you can actually FIND any (often, people pricing it at 500 or less end up finding their vendor full of gold, and their deeds end up getting resold for a profit on Atlantic)
And Barbed hasn't been below 300 per cut leather piece for almost as long.
If a departing friend (who made a small fortune rares collecting, and invested it in regs, base materials and colored wood) hadn't given me his stuff a year before the new BODs were introduced, I'd have given up on inscription, alchemy, carpentry and fletching already because the prices are so ludicrously high, and I can't gather enough stuff to fill my BODs on hand. I still have a bear of a time finding/collecting enough spined leather, shadow iron, verite and valorite.