Can we talk about how the materia system is irritating for casters?
I initially looked at materia slots on "endgame gear" back in 3.x in a negative light. I just saw it as a gil sink that I'd have to pay into just to have good stats. However, I came to appreciate it while playing BLM when I could put a little piety materia on my gear and never be at the mercy of server ticks for MP during the umbral ice portion of the rotation. However, it did lead to a problem where gearing up for BLM meant that SMN had terrible secondary stat allocation since they didn't want the same secondaries. That's basically the whole ACN problem all over again with stats you used to assign at level up.
Flash forward to 4.0, and I feel the problem is worse than ever. For starters, the "you can't meld secondaries not assigned to your role" stuff hit BLM with piety doing nothing, and we're back to the days of server ticks being annoying. Second, the jump between grade V and VI is much more than IV and V. IV and V were 9 and 12 stats. V and VI are 12 versus 40. This is such a large jump that it's just kind of ridiculous to look at grade 5s at all once the better gear becomes available starting Tuesday.
That said, with the bump up in secondary stats, we're potentially looking at 500 spell speed on BLM versus not wanting that on SMN. The BiS in 3.x didn't have spell speed on SMNs, and now we also have RDM not wanting it. RDMs get their dualcast, and they don't even have DoTs unlike SMN to benefit from the spell speed.
I really feel that the materia system encourages either picking BLM or picking SMN and RDM. I'm just really not a fan of that at all. It feels a lot like the glamour system and loot lockout / weekly tome cap which all are at odds with the job system, best working for a single job rather than in a system where you can switch jobs freely.