More Item Combinations Please

Alright, so I haven't been following the forums all that closely lately but a friend mentioned the "Prism Staff" discussions and I came to check it out, only to be extremely disappointed (as I'm sure many others were as well.)

My thoughts: There are a bunch of items out there with elemental affinities that clutter up people's inventories... Elemental Obis, Elemental Staves (Magian), Elemental Torques, Elemental Sachets and belts (from abyssea NMs)... There's probably a much more extensive list that could be concocted... These are all Rare/Ex items and there's 8 of each, one for each element...

It seems to me that the development team has been trying super hard lately to allow players to clear up their inventories what with the Porter Moogles and stuff... Well, why do we still have to lug around 8 of each of these items to get the most use out of them? Why can't we have a series of magian trials or quests to combine these items after obtaining all 8?

I don't see why this would be very difficult... You obtain a base item from a chest in Ru'Lude and the trial for it requires that you obtain all 8 of the rare/ex items in question and the end result is a single item that works for all elements... I don't see this being a balance issue since you have to go out and get the items anyway... Things like the magian trials take a ton of work to begin with so it's not like the player didn't earn it... We just want our inventories to be less complicated... without sacrificing our hard-earned item stats...

I personally stopped playing a few jobs that I enjoyed due to things like this. Love smn, sch, brd, blm and so on but between the avatar staffs, nuking staffs, healing staffs, obis, instruments and all that other misc gear you have to pick and choose what you really wanna play or spend all your time muling gear back and forth.

Having to have 8 staffs for smn, blm, sch, 10+ instruments, all the obis and everything is frankly just ridiculous. What they should have done is instead of giving us a fairly useless empy staff they should have given it different paths for nukers, smn, and healers. and the obis should be able to be fused into one, not with synergy but via a quest. Synergy is a lazy way to do these things. Gimme and interesting quest to fuse them.