So after checking the orders, I can confirm that I am a moron. I was thinking of the experience reward for orders. The amount of steel per day from orders is indeed 1,200. However, there is still the reward from game completions, which a lot of people underestimate because each one is pretty small.
Usually I get about 20+ steel from each match. This can easily be upwards of 300 depending on how many matches you play in a day. To be fair, I play a lot, so I might not have the fairest point of view on this.
This all comes back to how long it really takes you to unlock the stuff that you [i]want[/i]. I don't understand why anyone would want to take the time to unlock [i]all[/i] of the cosmetic items for [i]all[/i] of the characters, especially when most people only use one or two on a regular basis.
It's still ridiculous for any gaming news outlet to feed these misplaced, festering hatreds of microtransactions. People have already started labeling For Honor as "pay to win" because you can buy steel packs, and steel is used (as 1 of 2 materials) to upgrade gear. This doesn't make it pay to win, though, because gear's stats have very little effect in between the base levels that you can get the gear at. Also, since you need an ever-increasing amount of "salvage" for each upgrade, you would have to buy gear packs in order to get enough salvage, and then you would have to buy more steel packs until you get enough to upgrade. Basically it costs a lot more time/energy/money to jump through all of those hoops in order to gain a tiny boost in gear stats than it would cost to actually play the game to earn enough steel/salvage.
Steel is basically only good for cosmetics, so anyone who complains about being able to buy it is even dumber than I am.
Edit: ^Basically rewrote the whole post^
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Actually 1,200 steel a day is pretty accurate. I've got a rep 4 peacekeeper, and the daily orders are your biggest source of steel. You only get 100 steel for the contract orders, regardless difficulty. That adds maybe another 300 a day. Add that in with the average two hours a day and its pretty accurate.