I never inteded it to be an absolute statement, poor word choice.

Fireballs (if C is heat resistant) still wouldn't be very effective. They don't last long enough. The underlayment would be leather and preserved leather has fairly good fire resistant properties. I doubt it would be fun, but it would be survivable.

Balefire is a trickier proposition. RJ never really explained much of the mechanics. If I remember correctly Rand stopped a balefire stream by blocking with Callandor. If A 2" sword blade can do it, a 2 foot wide breastplate certainly would (if C stops balefire). Like I said, balefire creates its own fun discussions, lord knows there have been plenty of threads on it, maybe someday someone will do a balefire version of "I am my own Grandpa"

As for the dificulty of manufacture, look at the rest of my posts, making C armor would be incredibly simple. Making a large amount of it with AS sniffing and swishing skrts at each other every 20 seconds might be rough, but armoring ever single warder in at least C scale mail would be beyond easy. It would get even easier if a few AS would be willing to help the smith with rolling the metal into sheets. After it is rolled, then it is simply a matter of die punching the scales, transforming them sewing them (this would take the longest time)on the jerkin. A concentrated, manufacturing line type effort could armor all the warders within a month or two depending on the dificulty of the inital set-up (iron rolling process) and how many people would be available for sewing.

I don't think any such effort will be made, nor do I think it should be (from a story telling standpoint). If C armor makes any type of appearance in the story it will be an individual "eve of battle, I should have thought of this before" type of thing for an individual warder. The example I used elsewhere was Egwene transforming Gawyn's shield, or somehthing along those lines.