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.... and even with forge experience, the success rate to produce a sword length is low... (lots of things can go wrong) ..... but that is just a modern scenario....
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I don't know, some of those early descriptions of making and forging wootz cakes sound like there were a lot of rejects, at each step in the process. I think a low (copmpared to modern industrial standards) success rate is an antique scenario as well.
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Think about it..when did production in traditional societies end? late 1800's
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Hmm, much as I'd like to lay the blame at the feet of the industrial revolution and the peak of colonialism, perhaps it was more fundamentally the increase in travel and communication which made the homogenization of commodities on a world-wide basis possible.
When the Europeans were trying to figure out how to make steel in a more efficient way than the blister and shear methods (late 18th to 19th C.), they studied wootz but didn't really figure it out. In Smith's "History of Metallography" he says "Interest in duplication of the [wootz] blade declined as European steelmakers developed their own techniques and the introduction of the Bessemer and Siemens processes gave [a] homogenous steel more adaptable to large-scale production"
...so wootz was recognized as a superior material until the new technologies overtook it; this also coincided with the death of the sword as a functional object, since it was also overtaken by new technologies. I think that early scientific interest in the properties of wootz helped keep the legend alive into the modern era.
