Bret Devereaux

That worked! I am going to do the boring thing and actually agree. Armor prevalence is always difficult. Artwork biases towards high status armors and often towards greater uniformity. It's clear that the segmentata was a high status armor.

Question on that: how thick was your subarmalis? Armor that is terrible uncomfortable in a shirt is sometimes rendered more wearable in a gambeson.

My understanding, and I haven't done a detailed look myself, is that the segmentata is also less common in the East, where we see a lot more scale. But the literature - esp. the English language literature - has a strong western focus, as do reenactment groups.

Compounding that, it's clear that mail was the lower 'status' armor from things like Trajan's column, but trying to figure its prevalence is tricky. Mail is just a lot less likely to be preserved in the archaeological record in a way that we can interrogate or even recognize.

Small ferrous rings just rust away into nothing, or into concretions. And mail is fair more repairable, reusable, resizable - and expensive enough to be worth keeping. Consequently, mail finds from any period, tend to be damn rare.

Well, and its coverage - along with scale - is just better. The segmentata offers no protection for the upper legs or groin - those are areas where a cut or puncture can lead to lethal blood-loss quite fast! Scale and mail cover those areas in most of their forms.