Illustrations of history

Funny enough, one of the suspected advantages of this is that, though it required a skilled specialist to make, it was relatively quick compared to chainmail - lorica segmentata was designed to be mass-produced, essentially. ~20 big plates vs. 25,000 rings for mail.

It's harder to repair, though. A few links get busted in mail, you just make a few new ones of roughly the same shape and type and forge them in. A teenage apprentice of the local provincial town can bang out the repair. A bit of the lorica segmentata gets busted, and you need another plate of just the right size and curvature to replace it, and the local blacksmith of the ~100 population provincial town probably isn't going to be able to handle it.

When the Legions moved away from self-sufficient units (wherein specialist legionary blacksmiths handled a large portion of the work), the lorica segmentata, likewise, fell by the wayside.