I just happened to be crafting on my alt tonight and tried this out. HQ Adamantite Nugget with HQ materials was 149,696 and with NQ materials was 172,727. MistakeNot is right.
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Expanded inventory is a pretty common request. At the very least, it does work towards that goal by reducing the number of different items someone may have to carry around.
There's also probably some measure of time saving on the development end to not have to create a HQ version of every material they add in a patch or expansion. Even if it only takes a minute of time for a developer to add a HQ item, that could shave off hours of work better applied elsewhere.
I can completely see people wanting expanded inventory in general; it's a pretty clunky system given all of the items we often carry around. I've had problems myself at times when trying to hold all of the materials needed to make the daily GC turn ins if I haven't been good about emptying out my personal inventory. The sheer number of materials required to make some individual products can be a bit much.
That being said, I think there's more to this that we don't know about. The Japanese are very good at speaking obliquely or making "polite fictions" as my Japanese wife likes to say, when trying to express something that may upset another. It's not uncommon for them to give what we in the West would call a "lame excuse" as a means of saying No rather than being direct and possibly upsetting the person. I wouldn't be at all surprised if "saving inventory space" was one such polite fiction to address an issue best left not directly spoken to.
More than likely, the reason isn't particularly interesting unless you're a programmer. Considering they lead the LL with saying they weren't covering changes to DoH/DoL, but then they have this change to how both gathering and crafting will work going forward, albeit minor, tells me that the removal of HQ materials is a side affect of the issue, not the main goal.
My guess is there's some technical issue that cropped up due to several years of adding more and more items to the game, and cutting roughly half of that bloat would help. And seeing as how there's conflicting opinions on the importance of HQ materials anyway, they probably looked at the data and concluded that cutting them would work best.
Their explanation on them changing the damage formulae and seemingly lowering potencies for melee skills was important, but probably had more than a few people zoning out. Whatever this reason could be is probably not as important in the long term, so they may have decided to skip that and focus on what will affect the players.
That makes sense and isn't something that came to mind. I'm a scientist, not a programmer. :).
My guess is that the NQ and HQ items were previously being treated as separate items in the various tables, instead of HQ being an attribute of the item on the same table. If they're trying to cut down the total number of items, then removing base HQ raw materials is one way to do that. Hypothetically, those kind of data tables are infinite, but if you're trying to optimize, you still want to keep the number of lines the system has to search to a minimum, and removing HQ raw mats would instantly halve it.
They're not being removed from the database altogether but they're being removed from the marketboard and you'll have to manually downgrade items before you can sell them as NQ.
I doubt it. The bots are fine selling NQ.
Most likely this change is to combat inventory bloat. With the amount of crafting materials in the game and hundreds more coming in Endwalker, we just don't have room anymore for doubling the number further with the HQ/NQ divide.
I would imagine this is step one of a multi-step process, similar to how they phase out tomestones. First they remove the ability to get more, but allow players to trade in any HQ items they still have. A future patch will probably remove them from the game entirely.