the utility of leather armor

This started off as a reply to a comment, inspired by this piece of advice:

Upgrade your leather armor. You're close to getting the two BF armor types but until you do, upgrade that armor.

if I had one quibble with valheim's intended progression, it's that the leather armor requiring bones to upgrade feels out of place. Humor me and for the moment ignore those of us with thousands of hours that can waltz through burial chambers naked and pretend you're new to the game.

To get bone fragments at this stage of the game, you're either: killing skeletons, looting troll cave entrances, or venturing into burial chambers (am I missing anything a new player would know about?). Doing this is quite dangerous without better armor and weapons (i.e. an upgraded club, which requires ... bones, as does upgrading the stagbreaker) To upgrade the three core leather pieces (ignoring the cape, which requires 5 bones to even make for 1 armor point, making it quite a waste, comparatively) requires 15 bone fragments. To fully upgrade the entire set is a staggering 135 fragments.. How likely is it that anyone would ever have enough bone fragments to do this, while also prioritizing upgrades to the club? it's no wonder even new players often skip upgrading or even making it entirely! In the process of doing anything in the black forest, you're gonna run across a troll and if you don't or can't run, you'll kill it, unlocking the much better trollhide armor immediately (with no bones at all!)

The new Very Hard/Hardcore mode i feel really highlights this discrepancy. These modes really turn the necessity of overpreparing to 11, and my first impulse in meadows was "well i guess I'll just make and upgrade the leather armor for a change", but was immediately met by the above dilemma. I still never bothered making it.

The leather armor just doesn't have a place where it really makes much sense to make. If I were going to suggest a change, I'd swap the bone requirement from the leather armor to the trollhide armor. It makes more sense progression-wise.

Am I missing something obvious? Thanks for coming to my ted talk.