>>849942
It's fairly apparent from the amount of bullshit in your post that you don't know what you are talking about.
To put that much effort into a post with no sources, numbers, anecdotes, nothing but opinion, is just sad.
>Yes, you can make shit from shit-tier iron. It's still shit.
Completely wrong, poor quality ore takes more work to get impurities out and to make good material from, but that isn't the same as making it impossible to produce quality stuff out of it.
The Norse had similar methods for making good weapons and armor out of bog iron.
>For every one sword that was autistically produced to a level of excellence that it could cut through whatever without chipping,
You are overstating the difficulty involved in making a Japanese sword.
A decent quality sword would have is only made out of a few sections and folded a few times before being differentially hardened.
It's not like it they were folded hundreds of times or something like that.
>If you read accounts of Japanese battles, armor and weapons basically fell apart all the time.
Everyone's did.
Does it somehow surprise you that a spear might not react well to being struck against a steel or iron breastplate or helmet?
>you had thousands that would snap in half if they were to accidentally cut bone
I love the image of Japanese warfare where there are all these soldiers doing their best to carefully cut the enemy without coming in contact with bone lest their swords explode into fragments
What percentage of Japanese swords would you say are unable to cut bone and what source do you have for the claim?
>while still being just as overly time-intensive to turn from shit-tier ore into something decent
The very cheapest swords wouldn't be folded at all and even they were usable as weapons.
>when Europeans came to the point where they just started to mass-import weapons/armor from the Spanish
The importation of Western arms and armor to Japan is greatly exaggerated.
Western armor was never common enough to be more than a curiosity, Western swords never caught on at all and while Western and Indian iron ingots were popular, Suishinshi Masahide said that using tamahagane or nanban tetsu didn't result in any difference in a sword.
>relatively disposable/cheap-to-mass-produce spears
Yari to be used by ashigaru were, while yari used by samurai had no less work put into them than their swords, especially since the yari would generally be a samurai's primary close-quarters weapon.
It's these generalizations that make me think you are full of hot air.
>or slashing weapons meant to cause mostly shallow wounds and then pierce like a spear into uncovered vitals when the enemy is downed.
Now I am beginning to think you are just trolling me.
Tell me which cuts in the image I've posted are shallow slashes.
Apparently no Japanese sword would have ever survived tameshigiri.
>"hacking/thrashing-style
What the fuck is that even meant to mean?
A slash is a slash, a stab is a stab regardless of where you are on the globe.
>Europeans who mostly relied on martial arts or distance attacks.
You seriously think the Japanese didn't have martial arts?
So what were folks learning in dojos devoted to swordplay? Ikebana or something? Holy shit.