I looked a little bit at previous year comps to get a sense of how much inflation there is.
Lute, for instance, is 8x more common trade items, a Fleece, and 1000gp more than Starhide Robe. The part of that that bothers me the most is the 8x trade items, as my perspective (which doesn't go back that far on the topic) is that the problem with Fleece is that they are so ultrararily used in recipes.
Certainly seen where bits could be pumped into other things, but those recipes end and Fleece becomes the only thing to do other than for collectors of esoteric bits. Ring of Heroism did a great job propping up Fleece, then the recipe ended.
More gold is inflation that just seems the nature of the situation, even if 25% inflation in two years is not trivial.
Of all of the recipes, besides finding the Widseth #2 a disappointment, the one that still bothers me the most is ... Belt of Ogre Mage Power. I just really dislike lower end transmutes being so intensive for one thing that might go into something else in a two-year span of recipes.
I'd rather see 5x MS and 2k GP. (Unless this year corrects, gold has become significantly less valuable than a couple years ago, IME.) Or, 5x MS and 5x DS. Or, 5x MS and 5x MH (this year doesn't seem to do a whole lot with MH, which seems intentional but kind of weird as I don't think MH is scarce).
I didn't try to comp legendary recipes.
Even the BoOMP doesn't bother me a ton. High level inflation at the higher end for reasons and lower end recipes that seem okay.
On a related note, I do think the communication of future transmute plans is still lacking. Where does the player who doesn't look for stray comments keep track of which years are relevant to a story transmute or which year completions go into a RoH style transmute or the like?
I certainly didn't feel like Bead transmute was communicated clearly up until this year, so years of players just ditching old monster bits for a known use.
Do any completion tokens matter for future recipes at this time? I don't know.
Can say that there will be a story transmute after the next one ends every time, except how does someone who just started paying attention know that? What if the cycle gets broken and one year's bits become nothing but Fleece fodder when they could have been used for other things - how does someone know?