Cosmic Exploration Fishing Frustration

This is purely a post for the numbers. Just make it a bit more tolerable. If all you do is make it so that the mission doesn't end until your final cast is done (similar how Patience works by staying in your Enhancements until you are done with your cast) I will be happy. But the fact that you prepare for a cast only to make it worthless by anything other than luck based on what bites is utterly infuriating.

I'm excited to see where Cosmic Exploration goes, because from a fantasy standpoint it is a very interesting concept. That being said, the gameplay loop is lonely and overly streamlined to the point where it feels like design laziness when compared to the Firmament. There is no interacting with others except for in chat, and you can't gather to supply crafters with materials so it's just crafting and just gathering... very boring unless something changes with future iterations. Even the mech ops aren't based on people working together. If anything you are working against people and it doesn't provide variety to the gathering and crafting grind. Perhaps ops could give a bit of benefit to your currently equipped class for class score or even some research points.

I don't think having an option to trade materials to people would make the content meaningfully interactive to me. Not any more than hanging out in a town trading away minions that sell for 20 gil on the marketplace, anyway.

I actually prefer that you don't have to have mats for crafting. Doing the Firmament back in the day it felt like you were either forced to also do Diadem to get the mats that you need or buying the mats on the mb, which for some mats were a huge gil sink (if you're a big crafter you have the gil to spend, but the point still stands).
I will agree with how some of the missions are, though. I barely touched the fishing missions and got Fisher to 500k from Red Alerts alone (except the few missions I did for the tool). Some of those felt extremely RNG dependent.

I also really enjoyed the combo quests (like you had to gather something and then craft it) and I wish there were more of those.