The Difference Between Leaf Pick and Quality.
Now before we get into this I do want to take a moment to recognize that buds can be important part of quality. If you have me choose from two Qimens one with no buds and one with some buds, I will choose the ones with buds. My favorite White Tea is silver needle. But while there are probably numerous pieces of content about why buds are important to quality, this is not one of those pieces. We are going to take things a step further and talk about why this is not always the case and even why you can have too many buds.
White Teas
The idea for this blog came as I drank the Old Tree Gong Mei. 
The Old Tree Gong Mei is made from big large leaves and hardly, if any, buds. So it is a low quality? Not at all.
This tea is full of flavor bright and complex and lasts for steep after steep. In fact this tea is better than any other silver needle that I've tasted in the six months I've been in Zhe Rong, Fu Ding.
Picking alone does not make the tea. Making and terroir also play a big part in the teas quality. While my favorite white tea is Silver Needle, the truth is most of the Silver Needles I drink are pretty boring. Hence the reasons I have more Bai Mu Dans on my website than Silver Needles. It takes more than a high quantity of needles to make a tea good. Just because a tea is a Silver Needle does not automatically mean its of higher quality than a Bai Mu Dan or even a Gong Mei. Making has to be taken into account. Silver needle, Bai Mu Dan and Gong Mei are simply talking about the material. In fact when I look at Qimens I have regularly tasted teas with too many needles.
Qimens
Red teas gained a huge popularity boost in China with the creation of Jin Jun Mei. A black tea made solely from buds, this tea not only increased the demand for black teas in China but also reinforced the idea that the quantity of buds is in direct correlation with the quality. This is not true. It is very easy to have a tea that has too many buds.
From my expirence, buds in black teas offer a light sweet flavor. This is beautiful when balanced with the leaves of the tea. Together these two characterstics come together to create a wonderful and complex tea with all sorts of different flavors. But what happens when the tea is too bud heavy. In my personal opinion, black teas that are too bud heavy are unbalanced. They are light and sweet but lack any foundation or any substance. They are sweet and floral but have no mouth feel, texture, or flavor. It takes the leaves of the tea to provide a foundation of flavor and body. The Forrest Fragrance Qimen has a great aroma and sweetness, but also has a smooth rich body that can only come from the use of leaves in the picking.
I also want to note that often times black teas made from needles have more flaws in the making because they are harder to process.
The buds of the tea plant contain more water than the leaves. This is a significant obsticle in tea making as so much of tea processing is facilitating the water to leave the leaf smoothly and many flaws in tea making come from trapped water. Many of the bud heavy black teas I have had, including Jin Ju Mei, have been a bit funky for this reason.
Wrap Up
This blog is just a length way to say dont underestimate your leafy teas. Now as I mentioned before buds and buddy teas offer a level of complexity that leaf heavy teas dont, but they are very easily too soft and lack strong characteristics. Leafy teas have much bolder flavors, are often better processed and because their yield is higher they are cheaper. And while they can be more simple in flavor and not too unique, they can also be amazing. Imagine having a bold flavored teas but the flavors are bright and clean and delicious. These sort of teas far outstrip the average silver needle or Jin Ju Mei.
Leaf picking is not quality. Leaf picking is simply the material a tea maker uses. The quality will be determined by the terroir those leaves came from, the weather the day of the making, and the skill (and luck) of the tea maker him or her self.