I would have to completely disagree with rationalized away.
It is all a very intentional and when factoring in economics, quite logical and realistic.
First though: I want to point out that you are also failing to integrate the other races, some of which are very old, and who do trade with the humans.
Gnomes, Elves and Dwarves in particular. Very highly skilled craftsmen, with fairly stable cultures for long periods of time. Different races develop different things, some they sell, some secrets they reveal, others they keep for themselves. It’s a question of production capacity, time and money.
In particular fine metal work, glass work, jewelry etc. These guys produce lots of really great stuff, but they live in relative isolation from most humans, or at least their production facilities are. They produce this stuff for themselves, and their excess they trade/sell. The rich in the rest of the world get access to these high quality products, the poor do not. Acquisition and distribution of said merchandise is a huge issue on top of production capacity and excess stock.
Inconsistencies with who has what/old and new are easily understood in terms of trade. Astlan is not a utopia, there is a very real level of income/power inequality, and because travel and transportation is not democratized, the geographical scale on which this inequality persists is much shorter.
Those who have magic, have a lot of luxuries and “high magic tech” those without, can lead relatively primitive lives, very similar to medieval Europe.
Thus you see some huge differences like the ones you describe. There are very high tech things, but production and distribution are not democratized.
Most of Astlan is still feudal. In many ways it is an Ayn Rand paradise.
If you must compare to Earth, a better example might be the third world today. People in many countries don’t have indoor plumbing, but they can tweet and use twitter/facebook via cell phone, while squatting over a hole in the ground, and they don’t have TV in their homes but can go to a bar in town to watch the world cup on satellite TV.
Book making, book binding ehh…all comes down to making and reproducing books. Very easy to do with Sorcery and Alchemy. The actual hardest part is paper production, but that as you recall has been done on Earth for a couple thousand years. Some people do have movable type printing presses but it’s not that critical when you have mimeograph/xerox like capabilities.
Plate armor, chainmail etc are pretty good when you have magic to back them up and your primary weapons are swords etc. And I point out that Talarius’s plate armor is basically a space suit. It works very well against flame weapons and lots of other attacks (and is currently keeping him alive in the Abyss)
I don’t quite get your argument there, though, I have to admit. Have you looked at how modern soldiers dress? They wear a ton of armor, plate armor with Kevlar (similar purpose to chainmail) they just put clothes on the outside of the plates and the plates aren’t usually metal. Look at modern SWAT teams in large cities.
And yes, I can compare magical healing to surgical stitches. I did in my last post. Here’s the thing, if you have something that works very well (magical healing) traditional surgical techniques will be very primitive because there is no need to improve them. Stitching and normal medicine are only used when there is no priestly or magical healing around. Only poor people in backwaters need it etc. So therefore there won’t be a lot of advances in the science/techniques.
This is actually true for a lot of things in Astlan. Many things still seem backwater to you, because due to the existence of magic, those with access to it can use magic to do what they need done, there is no real incentive to advance more mundane things that the poor/magic poor people could use since the rich have a better solution at hand.
And when stuff trickles down to the poorer people? Why build land line phone infrastructure, just give people cheap cell phones to keep them happy. Sure 2G/3G Internet on a cell phone isn’t good, particularly for a computer, but without the land line structure for towers, it takes time to ramp 4G up. And even then those people aren’t going to get fiber optic speed ever. However, for now, they can marginally interact with the rest of the world.
The economic logic above is what leads to what you term as inconsistencies. Poor/selfish trade policies, no democratized transportation, isolated mass production centers/culture centers and a way for the oligarchs to get what they want with magic that they control and only “trickling down” some magic to others
I also think I did say that the cars really only function in the courts where the temperatures about half that of the rest of the Abyss? So alcohol is not a problem
You are hitting it on the head with the demons though. Think Mad Max, they don’t have the structure to make things, they steal, fix, jerry-rig etc. So it’s all a hodge podge. And they don’t share without getting something in return.