I assume they changed it from the previous materials because it *forces* you to move all around the yard. You can't just find one spot to farm berry leather and one spot to farm quartzite and, instead, you have to spread out all over the yard. That's an argument against just rebalancing, I suppose. So I think, with that in mind, that I can understand why they didn't just rebalance. They wanted to push us into exploring more of the yard, so they incentivize us to do so. My hang up on the new system isn't the system, itself; it's the names. The names of the materials are what kill me. AND the fact that we can take a bunch of unrelated materials and apparently morph them into these new materials, magically.
It's just so, so bad. (Although, I *could* get behind something like the glue station as an armor upgrade, mashing bug parts to make some type of paste or something. But turning a spider fang into a rock is just a bridge too far. It's asinine.)