Whats up with the weird stats for armor plates?

[ForrestFox]

A bamboo shield will have 2 armor plates, while a wooden shield LvL2 will have 2 armor plates. Wtf, why isnt the lvl2 giving better armor?
Also, the bamboo will weight less, and only drawback will be it has about 400'ish less HP than the wooden shield (witch means nothing as there is no information if HP has any meaning in the game or not. There is no stats saying an NPC cannon will take one hit or two hit or more to blast away 400 HP, so right now 400 hp is as pointless as 800 hp since we cant see the difference).

I have a Plastic Shield lvl 1 with 45 armor, and a Plastic Shield lvl 2 with 40 armor..

Why do the higher tier stuff seem worse or on par with the lower tier stuff? o_O
I'm so confused on this game.. Did they sack their QA team and just wing it and hope for the best when they released the game? :D

[Armitage Shanks]

Stats appear to be fairly random within certain ranges. As for armor plates, pretty sure the only real difference between higher and lower tiers and different materials is how much durability they have, which is important because more HP = longer lasting armor, even though in reality armor plates do almost nothing, they're always broken because unless you manually repair your hull and waste tons of resources up-keeping them between fights, they break almost instantly when shot and simply ablate 1 shot.

[Ryuu]

Yeah, i find that armor absorption values make no sense: a bunch of plastic bottles has 30, while the wheel has only 3.