Shirt of Focus came out in 2018. Idea of Arcanum shirt came about in 2019 as Shirt of the Oaf was 2020, so people could have bought Focus late in 2019 as dev process happened earlier than it had previously.
They could have seen this and decided to get more:
Multi-Year UR Shirt Set: Over the next four years we plan to release four Shirts. The first three give bonus/penalties toward the STR, DEX, CON stats and the final year grants +2 Focus (+2 to cast healing spells, cast damage spells, and polymorph damage.) At the end of the four years, all four can be combined so they make one Shirt that gives +2 to all those 3 stats and has the Focus power.
But, if you aren't planning to actually use those Shirts of Focus, why would you have bothered? If you knew you could get them in a reprint, it wouldn't have costed any more to wait - would have cost less as PYP prices generally rise throughout the year.
So, you got them to play with. Well, I assume you did. I did. So, as someone with multiple Shirts of Focus since I do builds for multiple players, the "problem" is that they wouldn't go into a transmute. Which they never were intended to do in the first place as earlier ideas for Arcanum weren't even shirts. If it was Nosering of the Oaf, Nosering of the Nimble, Nosering of the Imbiber, and Nosering of the Shrewd, Shirt of Focus would have same value until the four noserings turned into a shirt somehow and replaced Shirt of Focus just as Shirt of Focus replaced Shirt of the Fae (all of one year later).
Now, it's possible someone would get SoF for the transmute after it was no longer a PYP, but there would be no reason to do that either unless going to play with it as could just get it when PYP again if didn't want to play with it and lose nothing.
So ... from a transmute standpoint, we got our hopes up that a token we got to play with would have additional value as part of a new transmute that seemed entirely designed to make use of a token that already existed.
What bothers me about all of this isn't that my Shirts are going to be transmute worthless as the only reason to get them in the first place was to play with them. What bothers me is that Shirt of the Shrewd is a small variation of something that already exists. I suppose I could feel the same way with Shirt of Blessed Strength -> Shirt of the Oaf since it's mechanically very analogous. But, those are two different rarities as well it's a bit more interesting the difference between the two. +1 Focus, -1 saves comes across to me as a very dull variation that just feels like power increase as STR or DEX being odd or even matters in a way that Focus being odd or even doesn't.
That the end product is +2 Focus makes Shirt of the Shrewd seem exceedingly inelegant design, as a +2 Focus shirt already existed. It just comes across as intuitively obvious that you use the token that is the right slot, rarity, and mechanic to make the final product. So, when don't end up doing that, comes across as a cash grab to now force people to get "Shirt of Other Focus" even though SoF predates the Arcanum plan. It's that perception that I think offends people so much. And, I can understand why it feels so wrong even if this could have all been avoided by having Arcanum start with some other slot or with different mechanics than these particular stat boosts.
Now, nobody who owns a BiS token is going to get that excited by it getting replaced, but, um, that's the way this game works. At one point in time, Templar Set was BiS. Muk's replaced something in your build. Development in the game is based on obsoleting tokens over time, well, with the idea of BiS builds. The reality is that you can play Epic with Templar Set or whatever.
If I were going to complain about the Arcanum Shirt transmute recipe, I'd make an argument along the lines of how the original Eldritch recipes made sense because the number of players was much smaller and high end stuff was much rarer, and later Eldritch recipes got grandfathered into having insanely cheap recipes for tokens more powerful than legendaries. To go with Eldritch recipes for non-Eldritch tokens that are still going to be better than legendaries is as ludicrous as how expensive relics and legendaries became. Once the precedent is set that Arcanum recipes are trivially easy to complete, then stuck forever with those sorts of recipes or generate a bunch of backlash, so should just up the first Arcanum recipes to like 3x all TG and 10k GP or whatever now.
That would be if I were to complain about a shirt transmute recipe, but why would I do that?
