In a thread a few months back, Zarathustra posted:
Has any of you ever tried to boil the leather from ancient dire bears? Should produce a different result that other dire animals.
I finally managed to get enough sturdy leather patches accumulated to make an attempt today. At the leatherworking table it just produced a normal hard boiled padded armor with the same DC as normal dire animal leather. So no, it's not a different result from the others right now.
If it should be producing something other than hard boiled armor, then this should probably move to the bug reports forum. If this is correct, it seems pretty odd -- the DC to make sturdy boiled leather patches is 10 higher than to make hard boiled leather patches for an identical result. After the quote up top, I was really hoping this would turn out to be the leatherworking equivalent of steel, giving a flat +1 to AC. Any chance this is an implementation error and that's what was intended in the first place?