It was not necessary to use bad materials to make a good mech.
The skill of the mech designer could compensate for many of the shortcomings of inferior materials.
Yet there were hard limits to how extensively a mech designer could turn trash into treasure.
Any professional mech designer should be able to cobble together a functional mech out of terrible materials if it was necessary.
The mech designer would hate it, but it did not matter so long as they delivered.
Even so, almost every mech designer preferred to work with superior materials if they had a choice.
More powerful materials gave a mech designer more options. The mech in question could become extremely powerful in a single aspect, or achieve a balanced performance profile with a very high baseline.
Cost and resource scarcity prevented many mech designers from using as much expensive materials as they wished.
