So I want to be able to mass produce many weapons for my followers/wives/housecarls/stewards/kids and I am wondering what is the best tradeoff of good gear and still being very easily crafted and cheap to make? So far the best balance I found was skyforge steel, as it has pretty respectable stats (beating elven and nordic by weight and dwarven by power) yet I can pump them out pretty easily with steel ingot being a hell of a lot more common than quicksilver or other materials. So I think skyforge steel might win that, but what about armor? what light and heavy armor can I pump out like an assembly line yet still maintain quality?

Dwarven equipment surely wins this hands down? You can collect hundreds of ingots in one run through a dungeon.

But really the higher up the smithing tree you go the rarer the materials get, so it makes sense that iron and steel equipment will be the easiest to churn out. And actually, if you're not buying steel ingots then steel equipment would be pretty hard to churn out, now that I think about it.

Well steel ingots are quite cheap and every vendor and blacksmith seem to carry them (unlike that damn quicksilver that I never seem to see them with). As far as Dwarven goes, I might agree on the armor, but the weapons aren't as good as the skyforge weapons...I do agree they are very easy to mass produce though, I get my dwarven metal from that place in markarth. Only problem is if a follower or other npc prefers light armor.