Quoted By:
On a purely emotional level, I do tend to strongly prefer traditional materials and excellent craftsmanship. A hand-made pair of leather boots or treaded shoes with rawhide laces and tree cork and tree rubber soles (or whatever) will look amazing, perform very well, and last forever. However, they will be heavy and expensive. "But they'll last forever," sure, until they're lost (in sucking mud), stolen (by coloreds), or destroyed (by a raccoon while you're sleeping), etc.
The thing is, modern petroleum byproduct polymers (plastics, synthetic rubber, etc.) do have incredible physical properties not found in Native American-tier materials. Cheapness (AKA ubiquity) is actually a strength, not a weakness. If iron were as rare as gold, for example, we wouldn't be putting steel rebar into concrete.
Also, people have been using animal glues since before the dawn of agriculture, sometimes on clothing articles.
Sometimes a foam-weight piece of sweatshop synthetics is best. It's from a sweatshop, which sucks, and they certainly will not last as long as a mastodon-hide knee boot with sabertooth gut laces and fossilized amber soles, but while they last, they perform. And they do it lightly and (relatively) cheaply.
