This is a terrible idea. Once again this feels like a slap and slight against players whom have dedicated themselves to accomplishing specific feats of true merit w/ no true benefit to them. As has been stated all "True" crafters have mules w/ other crafts capped and subs capped. This feels like a feeble attempt to appease the non-crafting portion of FFXI. The inherent problem with this mode of thought, is they still won't level the crafts or corresponding subs. You guys really dropped the ball w/ CoP, and this seems like a repeat. All your managing to do is further alienate your hardcore player base, in order to make a game more appealing to casuals (See WoW Ready MMOs). Its not like rare materials are not already overly abundant. If your looking for some real fixes to the crafting system.
1. Make current non-hq'able items HQ'able. Juice, leather, ingots etc. reward those making the effort already >.>
2. Make certain things stackable that currently aren't. To me it makes absolutely zero sense why juice is not stackable when other food and bottled medicines are.
3.Make players over cap have less fail rate determined by skill above synth, i'm talking no more crit fails on stupid synths like ash lumber.
4. Introduce HQ mats and give a bonus to HQing the result. such as it is in life, this should be in game, a player willing to use HQ goods in there product should have a better chance in making a satisfactory result. making this proportional will help. So in the case of a Dark Staff, using a HQ piece of ebony lumber, and an HQ dark bead would give a 30% boost to HQing the result, conversely using only one of the materials in HQ form would give a 15 or 10% boost (depending on scaling). This would introduce new life into the materials market. (yes i realize this would effect the overall price of current HQ's, but any of my suggestions could be a sole implementation.)
5. Offer new key items that help crafters this could be tied to the lowering fail rate further etc make it only available to veterans.
6. make old gear and other non-consumables, upgradable. So taking that old elemental staff and synthing it with a gold ingot and a new gem, would produce a +2 elem staff (HQ +3)
7. If you want more ppl to craft offer more pathing options to greater open up current bottle necks.
8. Offer better Evoliths, to make augmenting gear via etching more worth while, I have yet to see someone shout for me to etch something. I feal mainly this is because the evoliths are harder to obtain and very limited in there scope.
9. Allow me to buy more than 1 etching item at a time, i always have capped cinder, there is no other use for it so either let me npc out it and recover gil, or allow me to trade it for fewell or some other items.
10. give a boost to having others synergize in a synth. Right now if i go w/ capped synergy and quick spam to completion it is cheaper and safer than picking up lvl 0's or others not capped, ass when they perform actions it hurts my gains and pressure value. (not saying make them skill faster, or make the values be adjusted to my lvl i can see the game breaking possibilities of that, but i'm saying give the main crafter an added bonus to actions they perform whilst others are "helping")
11. Provide more uses for garbage WIP materials ergo (Hunters cotton), its a bottleneck/gap synth and has no real value. sure its used in rng upgrades but that's it, items such as that should have more application. even if the application is purely decorative.
Pick one anyone, would honestly be better than leveling another craft to 100, just so my AH score can go up and show everyone how awesome i am at crafting, they already know since there are only a handful of hardcore crafters left on each server, hence why the number of goods is so significantly lowered.
12. FIX BOLTMAKER IT IDIOTIC in its current form.