For what it's worth and just my two cents:
I too was under the impression kyen in all its forms is still below seah qualitatively speaking and also has higher oud oil yields. One exception and one only is kinam which is a kyen that managed to age forever without turning to resin.
Yes, kyen is below seah qualitatively. Though it's not black-and-white. There are gradations and numerous variables. The kyara you mentioned is a great hyperbole to illustrate the possibilities. In certain circles, we rank wood higher and higher on the scale the more oil it contains. Of course, it has to go hand-in-hand with resin content and offer some sort of out-of-body experience when put on heat, but that is beside the point. Kyen is still great wood to own, heat and distill.
Please keep in mind: Most agarwood oils are distilled from feedstock that falls FAR below kyen on the grading scale. What we term 'oil grade' or 'kayu minyak' etc does not even begin to approach kyen. Once you have solid pieces of kyen, the wood is sold as 'wood for wood's sake' – not as 'wood to make oil'. There's a huge gap between the two.
Most wood that gets sold in the Gulf is just 'cosmetically enhanced' kyen. When buying wild kyen to distill, we're not competing with other distillers. No one buys wild kyen to make oil, save for maybe one or two crazy people you're in contact with. People buy kyen to paint, wax, polish, buff, perfume, smoke up and sell as incense. Without kyen, the GCC wood market would have gone dry a long time ago.
I also was under the understanding that while there is oil in seah wood there is NO resin in kyen cause not enough time passed to have resin formed. Why am I under that understanding? It was based from knowledge shared in this site for sure as I don’t recall distillers active in Ouddict forum touching the subject. Now who where what how?
I thought the same thing. I even heard from colleagues experimenting with yield-boosting techniques that the techniques wouldn't work unless the wood contained resin. Until we fiddled around with resin extraction and discovered otherwise. You can extract resin from oil-grade wood, shavings, kyen, etc
which we would have never believed to contain resin prior to this experiment. This doesn't contradict anything. It merely goes to show what I was trying to emphasize before, that there are no black-and-white absolute laws in this, where the presence of the one denotes the absence of the other. There are marketing agendas – starting with mine – that crumble to the ground when you properly take in what I said on the
Raw Resin page. It is what it is, and I'm not going to twist or hide anything so I can make a sale.
Think of it this way: If you assume that the wood MUST have a high seah content in order for the oil to smell like that same seah on low heat, you're also saying those oils which remind you of green kyara on low heat – starting with my own Royal Kinam, Kyara LTD, etc – must've been extracted from proper green kyara or they wouldn't smell like that.
It simply doesn't work that way. The essential oil that goes on to become resin does contain the olfactory DNA of the same resin it would solidify into 10-100 years down the line. Granted, it will never boast the same depth or complexity,
but the DNA is the same.
Perhaps and also equally likely may be the case that I misunderstood in the first place and was down a wrong path of fundamental understanding.
We are all learning new things every day, brother. What we learn today contradicts what we held as true yesterday. This is neither algebra nor logic. It's more like nutrition and art. The theories of today supplant and expand those of yesterday. New technologies make way for groundbreaking discoveries. New techniques change the whole game. We learn as we go along. This is a good thing.