Do you shame people for their choice of materia melds?

Materia power level is not easily quantifiable, and honestly, I think most people just ask other people who have asked other people (etc) what the best melds for so-and-so are and choose their melds based on that.

Edge cases aside (such as not even having materia on your gear at all or melding stats that just simply have no effect on a certain class, like Piety on Black Mage), does the choice of someone's materia melds draw ire from you if they are not to your liking? If so, why?

Personally, I feel like materia choice is subjective in some cases, but they are an illusion in others. I won't call out someone for melding skill speed on all their gear on Ninja, for example, because I know that they at least put effort into their gear/build than someone who melded nothing and came into content in default i430 AF gear and leveling accessories.

On a sidenote, it saddens me that gear tends to be figured out by expert players early on in patches. As such, this always drives materia prices a certain way and influences a lack of experimentation with materia melds. This brings up the question of whether there is really a choice with how you meld your gear - are you just doing things a different way or a worse way?

Unless its something completely farfetched (i.e. Skill Speed on a BLM, Piety on MNK, etc) I don't question what other people meld on their gear at all. You do you and I'll do me.

A poor choice of words in the title - you should never shame anyone for anything.

First off - I rarely check the gear of other people and even rarer look up their melds. I have no idea whats are preferable for half of the classes so who am I to judge if the NIN goes with Skillspeed rather than Crit?

I would stumble over a Skill Speed on BLM or Spell Speed on SAM. I would probably mention it to the player asking if this is on purpose. Maybe there is some inside I just don't get. But I'd say in 99% I wouldn't bother or even blame people for their melds.

Is Materia shaming a thing that happens?

I feel like as long as people are using Materia in stats their class uses we're good.

Also sometimes people just meld what they have. Some sort of slotted materia in there is better than nothing. I mean, I do that...I'm guessing others must.

You can try to shame me all you like .. But I fully plan to do a max SkS materia set for my Monk when I get to 80. I just wanna see how low I can get that GCD. I don't care about the DPS, I just wanna see how it plays XD

Yeah, if you don't have any elemental resistance materia you're doing it wrong.

It happened a really long time ago, when the first class specific weapons were used (nexus weapons).

Yes!
How dare they do 0.4-1.5% less damage, grrrrr!!

ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE

Nobody going to stop me and my paladin expert in gathering.