Please make the "Rare" Favor items useful

"Rare" being for example, Roundstones vs. Ooids.

No one, including me, is going to waste 3 red crafter tokens + the Rare items to buy one set of materials. I've gone through hundreds of normal favor items and HQed 3 full sets of 2* gear and then some using only the NQ materials. As a result I have ~30 of each Rare item wasting space on a retainer because the hope they'll be useful some patch.

It would be nice if we could trade the Rare items we don't need for the normals items.
Alternatively considering a) the rarity of the Rare spawns and b) the 3 token cost of the trade-in far exceeding its usefulness, just reduce the Rare item trade-in to 1 token and make it require 5 of each item instead of 3.
Or, double or triple the starting quality bonus for using the HQ materials

I agree with this. I think the first idea would be best - make it more of each rare favor item required, but only one red crafting token required. I don't think they are useless, though - some people are clearly buying them on my server at least. I'm selling some and any that don't sell, I'll just keep around for a day when I no longer need to be picky with how I spend my crafting red scrips (ie, when they are no longer capped per week).