For what it's worth, making white wood bows in the English longbow style using perpendicular grain is very common. I've done it with ash and taken the draw weights up to over 100lb, and it's very good with elm and hazel too. The benefit is simply that you can choose the easiest layout of a stave - if the stave has awkward sideways bend, or weird kinks that would be an issue in figure A, simply flipping it 90 degrees can often solve that.
When using boards it's even better as it allows ideal orientation of grain for strength.
