In general (at least for molecular calculations) basis sets and DFT functionals are fit to some high level calculation or experimental energy. It is speculated that an accurate energy will result in an accurate wavefunction and thus accurate properties, but this is not guaranteed. There have been papers looking at how different functionals perform at computing properties as well as basis sets optimized to compute particular nonenergetic properties.
Are there any functionals/basis sets optimized to calculate bulk material properties rather than the energy? Say polarizablity or refractive index (I'm not certain what properties would be of most interest to material scientists in general, as I have more of a molecular chemistry background).
To clarify, I'm not necessarily interested in functionals that were intended to be better for some property, but were still fit using minimization of error in the energy as a criteria. I'm hoping to find cases where the fitting was done explicitly to minimize the error of some property within a test set, rather than cases where the functional was implicitly improved by, for example, using a different test set.