Gathering Grade 1 and Grade 2 soils

Is there any reason for soil to be hidden still? Depending on your luck, you could go through 30+ nodes before you see one. I find that the hidden nature of them discourages gardening. Even if you want to just plant krakka root seeds, you have to spend an hour or more just to find the 8 you need for one round of gardening. It just seems odd that it is so time consuming just to get the soil when gardening is over a year old now and there are few extremely lucrative things available to grow at the moment.

Gardening is pretty pointless afaik. You can gather the items you would get from gardening them in a full plot in a few minutes. That and Grade 3 soil is much easier to come by than 1 and 2.

Gardening is far from pointless, as there are crafting materials and chocobo items that have no other source. There's no place you can go to gather Glazenuts or Thanavarian Onions.

It is correct, though, that there's not much use for Grade 1 and 2 soils. Grade 3 is both more useful and less effort to obtain. In theory, you can gain more Grade 1 and 2 soils per hour - but that requires gathering constantly for an hour, compared to a five minute trip once per hour to gather a grade 3 instead.

Due to the way gardening works, in that you will never get a seed from the 1st seed planted, I will often use a grade 1 soil in that spot to save a few gil.