[ceratopisan]

In all fairness, you can brew with larger amounts in shorter time and also resteep with black tea too, or I suppose green too.

"Get the leaves wet and drink the water" is really all you have to do for tea. All these other rules are just people saying how they like to have it, but you don't have to.

And yeah, oolong variety is not as well-known as it should be. Blame it on health-hype for green tea.

[archagon]

Sure, but my impression is that the taste does change depending on which way you brew it. Larger/shorter tends to really bring out the more subtle flavors, which oolongs have in abundance; meanwhile, traditional black teas like Darjeeling are so potent that going smaller/longer works best. (I've tried brewing those teas larger/shorter a few times and it was just too much for me!) I also think the # of possible resteeps is directly correlated to your brewing technique: smaller/longer sucks up most of the flavor in the initial brew, while larger/shorter leaves a lot of flavor for later infusions. (But I could be wrong about both of these things.)