Somehow I missed my ping the first time this thread came around, but I took a look and it turns out there's a bug that's preventing 5 different types of crossbows and a variety of other gear from spawning in towns. Most gear in this game is culture specific, but there are certain items that don't have an associated culture (like noble bows), and usually the culture for these items is not specified in the xmls and gets set as 'null.' When selecting an item to produce, the game will pick an item either that matches the town's culture, or an item with a null culture.
Well for whatever reason, a handful of items in the spitems xmls are instead given a "neutral_culture" tag, including the bound crossbow, and these items get labelled as "Calradian" culture in the code.
Since "Calradian" is niether null nor a valid culture of a town, then the items with that tag are blocked from ever getting chosen to be produced by workshops. If those tags are removed from the item in the xmls by using Ctrl + F for "neutral_culture" and deleting the line, then those items will begin to spawn in towns again.
So I'll go ahead and report this, but in the meantime, you can solve this by going into the weapons.xml file in the Sandbox Core/ModuleData/spitems folder and delete everything that's in the red box shown in the second image above. If no culture is specified, then the game assigns 'null' to the items culture. There are other instances of this in the other equipment files too if you want to take a look.
Btw Medivhtratos, what exactly did you mean by this? Prosperity is no longer a factor for any equipment production from what I can tell, including bows and armor.