I've finally had it with the vanilla metals' "stepladder" balancing and trying to evaluate my weapon's armor-piercing qualities based on it, so I made a bunch of new metals (iron, bronze and steel variants) with steel's shear values, but scaled down sharpness, and let them have their own blunt, elasticity and force-transfer-stuff values. Will likely throw my old "stepladder" steels into the trash and use these instead.
Also, lately I've been brainstorming about the underused industries in the game, as well as how arms and armor production in DF doesn't really convey the amount of labor it took to make these things - moreover, to keep them in good condition throughout the years; even with increased metal requirements it kinda doesn't. And it just hit me... oil, wax, sand - all of them were used for medieval equipment maintenance, and all of them are things DF has, but barely utilizes. So, new iron and steel variations will require some combinations of these materials, as well as a lot more coal than vanilla, to bring back that feel of fuel shortages DF used to have before multi-tile trees. New bronze, on the other hand, will not need that, but instead require an asinine amount of mold parts (rock/clay, nothing too demanding) - and the problem of tin being quite rare is still there too.
Of course, to counterbalance that, there needs to be some way of increasing the homegrown metal yields, e.g. from smelting ores; maybe by duplicating [METAL_ORE:metal:100] tag? New smelting reactions if that doesn't work. Otherwise there's no good reason for the player to make their own stuff, because caravans and goblinite will be better by a landslide... Or I could just be an asshole and reduce the yields from goblinite
We'll see.