Ultima Online Five on Friday Q&A

A collection of short answers comes at us from this week's "Five on Friday" Q&A feature on the official Ultima Online website.
Why does a GM Lumberjack require GM Carpentry to cut colored logs into boards when a GM Miner is NOT required to have GM Smithing to smelt colored ore?

Yeah. The way the Carpentry crafting system was updated for ML made the (Wood Selection) the real gatekeeper on whether you could or couldn't craft something with a special type of log. For ore, it's much simpler, you just use the ore on a forge; it circumvents the crafting system completely. Creating old boards with plain wood used the crafting system, but required zero skill in Carpentry this is the problem. One solution would be letting players choose whatever wood they wanted, and then if they chose a carpentry item to craft (not boards) and didn't have GM Carpentry, it would fail to craft if it wasn't plain wood.
-Draconi