Putting the best armor in the first town was bad design, I think.
You really couldn't know it was there unless you walked with tab/alt pressed everywhere. It was hidden in a pixel-wide hole in the middle of a field you had no reason to go to. Was it bad design? I don't think so. It wasn't as overpowered as you think. It was a suit of mail that wasn't better than the generic Plate Armor. The great thing about it was that it had a low strength requirement so you could easily put it on your wis based cleric or even a wizard to get some protection going. Though arcane failure relegated it more to the cleric side of things.
