Quote Originally Posted by halfeye View Post
Compared to how many times of making and improving an iron dagger? sure the dagger's a little easier per item, but how many daggers do you need? five thousand? ten thousand?
The "iron dagger" trope was out of date by the time I started playing Skyrim, and that was less than a year after its release. If you're grinding smithing like that, no wonder it takes forever. Literally anything else you can make is more efficient, more profitable, and faster to grind.

Leather helmets are a good item to mass produce - each one will improve your smithing about six times as much as an iron dagger. But as revealed to me in one of these threads a few months ago, the real express ticket to smithing mastery is - dwarven bows. For a total of three dwarven ingots, plus one iron, you get the value of (give or take, depending on your skill level) about 40 iron daggers.