Hi Mike
Funny you should mention that. In fact, the full grain leather handles the water much better than the nubuck leather. To understand why we need to understand what the jargon words mean.
Full grain: this just means the normal leather off the surface of an animal. It has a smooth water-shedding surface due to its nature and what the animal needs from its skin.
Nubuck: this is usually a split leather. It's a layer sliced off the inside of the full grain hide. This process leaves the leather manufacturer with a thinner surface layer, which is what the market wants. The excess is given a fancy name like nubuck and sold as well. It used to be called suede.
Now let's look at the physiology of the animal whose hide it once was. It needed a smooth waterproof surface on the outside all right. But on the inside surface of its hide it did not need a smooth water-shedding surface. All it needed was a looser layer of collagen and so on to support the surface. So this inner layer is NOT as waterproof or as strong as the outer surface layer.
So what do many shoe makers use on the outside of their shoes? Expensive full grain leather – or the cheaper inner suede layer? If making leather boots they have no choice: nubuck would stretch immediately and be unusable. But on joggers nubuck can be layered over a non-stretch synthetic fabric as a dress trim layer. All it has to do is resist abrasion, which it can do.
Make no mistake: under the suede or nubuck outer trim on joggers there is a strong non-stretch structural layer of synthetic fabric. The leather does NOT replace anything structural in such shoes: it is a trim.
Your statement that most shoes will wear out before the leather cracks and fails is usually true in dry conditions. But when the shoes are used in continuously wet conditions it is not true. I have had too many shoes with leather trim which failed this way. Repeated wetting out and drying rips any treatment out of the leather, which then goes hard when it dries and cracks.
An additional problem with the leather trim layers is that after a while they absorb water. This adds a fair bit of weight and takes a long time to dry out. Joggers with leather trim end up much heavier than purely synthetic joggers. Not what I want on my feet.
Just because leather is a good skin for a cow does not mean it is the best thing for human footwear. It might have been, several hundred or thousand years ago, but not today. Just as cotton and kapok have been replaced by better things.
Cheers
