Whether Shadow Hammers (and coppers, for that matter) sell depends on the shard.
I routinely see Shadow hammers selling at the in-game auction I work in for the same amount, or more, as DC, on Lake Austin (roughly 50k each). Copper hammers aren't much different, but rarely seen.
Bronze hammers, on the other hand, are the highest Runic you can get from a small BOD (and there are a lot of useless small BODs that either don't have larges or whose larges suck), and are the primary means of creating Relic Fragments by smiths (there's a method that works for Carpenter/Imbuers without runics, but that version uses wood that's too hard to find, and more likely to be nerfed).
POF, I've seen sell at auction, from a low of 3 jars per million, to a more common 350-400k each, and sometimes as much as 500k if a bidding war starts. ON LA, the problem isn't getting the BODs for it as much as getting the ingots to fill them, as the Val Hammer shenanigans UOKaiser mentioned above drove away most of our for-profit smith miners, leaving those of us left mostly supplying ourselves, while dealing with all the new content drawing us away from crafting (starting with the replicas and SOTs on non-fel spawns, and carrying on through the various event cycles, SA and training up Imbuers).
Losing 10 ingot vendors might not get noticed on Atlantic, but if your shard only had 6 legit and 4 cheaters to start with, and loses all the legit ones to players taking temporary or permanent leave from the game at about the same time the cheaters went up in flames, you get hit with a resource crunch pretty quickly - and everyone was too busy chasing replicas, event rares and the like to even consider picking up the slack. I mean, which would you do - mine 35 of the 40 hours a week you can play, and craft 2-4 of the remaining 5 - or go out and do spawns, explore new areas and chase after neat new items with your guildmates for those 40 hours?
The simple fact is that the gatherer/crafter-only players were a dying breed even before AoS, and were pretty much gone by ML. Most people left will choose playing an adventurer, spawner or PvP fighter over mining, if there's more than a minimum amount of activity within one or more of their guilds when they log in.
