As it stands, several armors are just not worth crafting due to the way their recipes work. For instance, the Scale set is completely useless--it provides as much armor as iron, but because each piece requires 4 Iron Scales and the respective leather piece, the set costs the equivalent of an iron chestplate for each piece! Despite this, it only provides 3 armor on the chestplate and leggings and 2 armor on the boots.

Another example: The Mercenary set and the Reinforced set both cost exactly the same (except for the boots). One provides the same stats as iron; the other provides the same stats as diamond. There's no reason to craft the Reinforced Set, ever.

The first thing I would do is set up the Plate and Scale recipes so that 2 iron = 2 plates and 4 iron = 4 scales. This should alleviate the problem of scale mail costing as much as three sets of superior iron armor. It also solves some other oddities, such as the Guard Chestplate being far better than the Scale Mail chestplate despite costing 1/2 as much.

Secondly: Scale mail needs to provide more armor. I'd up it to +5 chest, +4 leggings and +3 boots. This would give it a total of 12 armor, compared to Reinforced's 16 armor. There's a couple other oddities--why on earth does the Archer's Vest provide the same armor as the Reinforced Chestplate?--but this is the biggest one, and the one that lead to me making this post.

Finally, Reinforced Armor should only cost 2 plates for each piece, instead of 4/4/3/2. There's no reason it should cost as much as the Mercenary set if the Mercenary set is going to give diamond level stats.

An aside: I'm okay with most of the recipes that cost fabric or other esoteric materials, because A) they're harder to balance anyway, B) most of those items have acceptable stats for their cost, and C) I honestly wish more mods made use of cloth as a material, since it rewards players for going through the effort of creating a sheep farm or gathering dyes.

As each armor will soon have a unique effect, be able to upgrade into a unique effect, be a base armor that one can craft early on if the materials are easy to acquire in that situation, or be either the Royal Guard armor or the Full Metal armor, each armor will have a unique reason to be crafted and thus the recipe rebalance is achieved.

Thank you so much for this feedback! As I've said, Mcda is in beta and this kind of feedback is exactly what I am looking for. In many respects, I was trying to get the content in first and the make the tweaks later; so this is awesome! :)