@futurebird There's a similar thing about Roman cement. It lasts far longer than modern cement, said people who don't notice that 95% of buildings the Romans built that used cement fell down.(It is actually interesting to see why the surviving cement is so robust and whether it's reproducible, and there has been some good research on this, but it's not that the Romans were magic, it's that they were lucky in a few cases and we get to study the luck. There's probably a similar thing in furniture, where if you look at the pieces that have survived you can learn something interesting about how furniture should be made).