Yeah, was trying to avoid doing the "grown steel breastplate" stuff, briefly thought of modding in an ironwood tree, or even an ironwood treatment reaction, and actually tried out a world where humans have steel... which is not my cup of tea, yeah it's handy as a human adventurer, but it's annoying on everyone else, and it doesn't really change much about your opponents since they still go "I need a helm, and uh... ooh, that breastplate looks nice... maybe a couple mail shirts, and I'm good to go!" so I reverted that change after one test world.
I tried a couple things to make dorfs stop crapping out billions of pieces of low quality copper trash, a handful of middling quality iron pieces, and once in a blue moon something steel. Didn't have much luck, while adding in just the steelmaking reaction and armors/weapons to a new small-sized race means I can find sites that have a trove of goodies distributed around without having to deal with a horde of godstomping steelclad ubermodbeasties.
Incidentally the best way I found to make a daisho (katana+wakizashi) set work that both avoids being stupidly overpowered and actually gives you a reason to use them together instead of one with a shield was surprisingly obvious after I realized it worked for weapon tokens:
[ATTACK_FLAG_INDEPENDENT_MULTIATTACK]
Tossing that into weapons you intend to be paired together lets you multi-attack without the huge penalties so you don't feel the need to compensate by making the weapons overpowered. It would work fine for short swords even to give a reason to use them over long swords.
I love wading through a crowd of enemies while plotting a path so I can try to take two heads per step, makes it feel much more reasonable when the stragglers turn and flee.