Hardened leather added an interesting dynamic to armour making in legacy haven as you could influence its quality heavily through wax and cycling hard leather over and over. Now that steel armours take leather, I feel we should have the option to use hard leather as normal leather.
These type of complex interactions with quality make it a more interesting system. Considering quality is the end-game focus, it should be allowed more dynamic interactions.
But instead of having to watch your inventory when making multiple hard leather, just allow us to "break up" hard leather so they are usable as normal leather. Either through a crafting menu or by right clicking as it is with breaking up hides into patches.
And/or maybe nerf CTCs because the quality you can get with them make it pretty easy to outclass any steel plates you make, with a UA/MC/AGI buff.