Bicurious Trees ... why?

With the changes to gatherable items and gathering loot lists in 1.21, we now have the rather bizarre situation that one tree can cough up two types of logs for the first time.

When the updated loot list for Iron Lake in the patch notes showed oak logs alongside the mahogany logs, for some reason I assumed that two of the four nodes would be switched to oak or so. But instead, the mixed mahogany/oak trees can cough up either log :confused:

Was it really necessary to remove even more logic from the botany loot lists? Did the Black Shroud and Coerthas not offer enough oak trees?

There are other examples, such as the maple trees around Emerald Moss now dropping walnuts, and elm / ash getting mixed at Horizon.

Is consistency and logic in having a tree not drop items that obviously match a completely different tree really so difficult? It seemed to work fine until now. Why was this sudden change made?

There is also once again inconsistency in the loot lists between trees in the open world and trees in gathering leves. The Iron Lake botany leves still yield mistletoe, which was removed from the trees, but not the oak logs or sagolii sage that were added. It seems the gathering leves still use pre-patch loot lists.

Why can you now get carrots and onions off of trees? Answer: Magic.

Sadly, they gave up trying to be realistic with the trees several patches ago.

Hopefully it's something they will fix soon.

I think what they were going for was to have "Oak Logs" act as Mahogany branches since branches don't seem to have a use atm in the new recipes. I had my own personal opinion of how they could diversify the gather system for Botanist where they could reintroduce the multiple tree aspect but with a twist.

The basic idea would be each area would have a Common, Uncommon and Rare node. A Common node would have a 75% spawn rate whenever a node is exhausted, Uncommon 20% and Rare 5%. Within the 3 main territories the drop rates would work as followed.
Grade 1/3/5: Common=Max 4 yield, Uncommon=Max 2 yield , Rare= Max 4
Grade 2/4: Common=Max 8, Uncommon= Max 4, Rare= Max 8
In Coerthas the Grades would work like
4: C=4 U=2 R=4
5: C=8 U=4 R=8
HQ Rate would work as followed C=5%, Uncommon=25%, Rare=50%

Abilities could be added to increase the chances of Uncommon/Rare spawning and the abilities that increase the longevity of a node would be encouraged for those who want to keep Uncommon/Rare nodes alive longer when they do spawn.

As for how the trees would be placed I have thought of it like this
LL
1=Ash/Elm/Maple
2=Ash/Maple/Elm
3=Walnut/Ash/Yew
4=Walnut/Ash/Yew
5=Mahogany/Oak/Rosewood

Ul'dah
1=Elm/Maple/Ash
2=Elm/Ash/Maple
3=Walnut/Elm/Yew
4=Yew/Elm/Walnut
5=Rosewood/Oak/Mahogany

Gridi
1=Maple/Ash/Wlm
2=Maple/Elm/Ash
3=Yew/Maple/Walnut
4=Yew/Maple/Walnut
5=Oak/Rosewood/Mahogany

Coerthas
4=Oak/Mahogany/Rosewood
5=Oak/Rosewood/Mahogany

While I do understand that with the current system things like Rosewood can only come at a max yield at 1, the above is just a concept that would encourage the idea of diversifying the areas while offering a reason to go to one area over an other based on your priority of quality over quantity.

I'm just sick of pulling salt leeks when i'm trying to get yew for GC supply now, 'round about humblehearth way. i don't mind that they're in there but i'm well over 50% rate of getting salt leeks, even after messin with stats and perception and so on, still with the salt leeks! i'm going to have nightmares about them!

To the OP, I think that this is merely a case of them not being able to move the current gathering nodes without a map rewrite, which is schedule for 2.0, at the same time they're giving us already roughly the same gather tables that will be used in 2.0, so stuff is falling out of logic, due to technical limitations.
That's my guess

There are definitely no technical limitations. Back in 1.0 days, each tree in a zone had a potentially different loot table. They could have made it so that half the trees gave Oak and half the trees gave Mahogany, but they chose not to.

Raldo is spot on, the complexity of gathering loot lists used to be greater than it is now, so technical limitations should not be an issue.

I'm not an RL tree expert, but a friend said that the tree nodes even looked close to the real thing - i.e. pine logs and branches coming from something that looks like an actual pine tree. Now you have those same nodes giving rather different things :)

Especially considering that oak logs are not in particular low supply, and that mahogany logs can only be found at Iron Lake, it just seems like a very strange decision both using in-game logic and out-of-game logic.