They are designed like that across all crafts. Weaving is notorious to let you want to craft with cloth 4 levels before you can make it. It was pervasive in ffxi. Never seen a reasoning behind it. It never sets up a healthy market between higher and lower levels. It just seems to make leveling harder.

But crowsbeak hammers, while they look stupidly designed with R40 BSers required for the head and canvas cloth for a lowbie hammmer...are actually like that for a reason. They are a material for the R47 hammer. R 50s were meant to make those hammers for low level players. We just didn't know that at the time and assumed SE was just trolling.