I think that making leather easier to produce would also perhaps increase the resources that newer players have. What a majority of people do to measure how much they're charging for a service is time (and quality of the service), but time is a main factor. A full set of laen armour takes a VERY long time to make if you want all runes and chants. If leather were much easier to get a hold of, it would be worth it.

I also don't think that this is going to create some sort of overabundance either. If there's an overabundance of anything, it's laen armour. As it stands, there's no variation to armour, and even the mineral changes that were implemented never really accomplished their goals of people using different minerals.

Perhaps with a look at leather AC, maybe some of the mineral types that were changed before could be looked at, to make them, not necessarily comparable to laen, but maybe good enough that a player may actually consider using something other than laen.

Going to add another idea here.

Some weapons have an option of being wood and metal, like a metal shod staff for instance. It would be neat if mineral and leather could be integrated together. Like, armour that could have leather parts and mineral parts. This could maybe add the variation that people are looking for all while adding some pizzazz(sp) to leather.