This still seems such a needlessly complex system that it boggles my mind. I mean I am glad that they are working on getting better items to show up and all but so much is tied to this production system and all of it is broken.
I wouldn't really call the production system broken or complex. It takes 10 days and 1 single iron ore to spawn an ultra tier armor; that's it. Once it's properly balanced and polished it won't be much different in functionality to the random spawning that you suggested. It's meant to work regardless of player intervention, so micromanagement isn't actually (supposed to be) necessary.
In reality, ultra tier armor already spawns frequently, but like I said, it's a large category (174 items in total) which is bigger than both medium and heavy armor categories combined, so what happens is the spawns get heavily skewed towards the lower valued items, since the items in that category currently have a wide range in value from 5k to 600k+. Once the price changes are implemented they can re-evaluate everything, and if necessary, separate the highest value armors into another category or two (e.g. 'noble' or 'legendary' armors) with their own production rates to increase their spawn frequency.
That said, I ran a test, and there
does appear to be a moderate shortage of iron ore in the world. Over the course of 420 days, 1925 ultra armor items spawned worldwide in total, giving an overall rate of
4.58 ultra armors per day. The world had 53 artisan shops and 17 smithies in it, which
should give an expected rate of (53 + 17) / 10 =
7 ultra armor spawns per day. That means ultra armor is only being produced at roughly 65% of its expected rate (4.58 / 7 = 65.4%). That's explained through a shortage of iron ore, and one potential solution is to just boost villages' iron production.
I think having an npc that you are able to commission expensive armor from if you're above a certain clan tier or something would be fine though. Also, there's no hard cap on the value of looted items, but that's a different topic.
FYI, if anyone wants to remove the iron ore requirement from ultra armor spawns since there's currently a shortage, you can do that in the spworkshops.xml file in the SandBox modules folder. Just open it up in notepad or notepad++ and find the "ItemCategory.ultra_armor" production listed under the artisan workshop and delete the
<Input input_item="iron" /> tag above it. You can also increase how often it produces an armor by changing its
conversion_speed to 1 (or more). Like so:
A conversion speed of 1 means the artisan will produce 1 of that item per day. You can repeat that process for the ultra armor production of smithy workshops too if you want.
