Another sad excuse to do nothing about an obvious problem.
A very, very small amount of people do any sort of HELM these days.
Tons of ores/logs are getting tossed on the floor because the person in question has NO USE for them.
Single logs/ores are, also, not worth putting on the Auction House.
Because we can only have 7 items on the Auction House at any point in time, these items are not worth enough Gil to hold on to. They are either sold directly to the NPC, or dropped on the floor on the spot. Most people don't even take the crafting materials out of the boxes from Voidwatch. Why? Too much inventory space taken, worth little-to-nothing from the NPC, not worth enough on AH as a single item.
If logs and ores stacked to 12, it's very possible there might actually be a market for these things.
As easy as it is to make Gil these days, nobody is going to put up a log for 5k when they could be putting up something more pricey and in-demand. However, as often as logs/ores/etc come from Voidwatch, if they stacked, a lot more people would be interested in putting up 12 logs for 60k instead.
I get the feeling SE employees have never played another MMO before. FFXI has limited systems, and I get that, but they're missing out on so many things they could be doing to make the game much better.