Simply put, I want the default jeans as a legwear so that they will go under certain types of footwear such as high boots, as the default jeans being a bottoms piece makes them go over said types of footwear.
Legwear mods don't draw anything on the back or chest layers. The standard jeans item includes back and chest elements.
Some legwear items in the core game (such as the garter belt)
do include back and chest elements. They're drawn on layers such as
g.her.torso.rightThighStocking.stocking.hipLayer.chestStocking. Perhaps there were some complications involved in drawing custom artwork on these layers, which caused
@sby to omit them when he created the template extension mod. I don't know; you'd need to ask him for the details.
In the meantime, you could create a hybrid mod which uses the Bottoms type for the waist clothing and which draws the remainder via the Legwear modtype. But the resulting mod would probably be susceptible to runtime weirdness (such as only
half of the garment responding to any RGB slider). You can add custom scripting to address those problems - but the result is sometimes a "prima donna" mod which hijacks too many things, refuses to work under some circumstances (e.g. when loaded via moreClothing), and prevents
other mods from working correctly.
A lot of my own work falls into this category, which is why I'm reluctant to create another such mod unless it does something impressive enough to justify the compatibility risks and general disruption.
It might be simpler to write something akin to
hairOverlayPatch - a new mod which elevates the footwear layers into the foreground.
Alternatively: grab the high-boots file, republish it as a Bottoms mod, and load it
after the jeans.
It's quite possible that there's a simple solution or workaround which I've overlooked. If someone has a suggestion to offer (or if you want to just go ahead and fulfill the request) then please feel free to do so.