The shit clothing is still clothing in the earliest stage of the game, then it turns into cloth and leather and something to do during waiting hours, like darkness or cooking or weather.

The mag. lens reduces the cost of a fire to little more than a stick, if you want to bring the fire inside via torch, else it's free. Even playing pilgrim there is something special to not wasting matches and it organically puts peoples minds towards big batch processing, but as the previous commenter pointed out, higher difficulties is where the mag. lens shines. You can't just sit on your bum for hundreds of days with enough matches for a fire every other day and hundreds of days are a time scale on which one could slowly and methodically explore everything (for the achievement).