A Method of reducing the amount of Material Bloat in the game.

The Problem: I would say since the removal of losing gear upon spiritbonding it, materials end up building up in excess, while yes Collectables have been a means of pruning excess materials from the game there isa lack of "tier" build up when it comes to the overall design.
By this I mean, if you look at the current design of Collectables, then when it comes to that method of obtaining crafting materia, then all you have to do is gear enought o handle the Purple Scrip item and you are good to go, there is currently no other means to speed up the process of gathering crafting materia and here where I think lies the problem with how 6.05 executed it's "Crafting update"

The Problem 2: As was made painfully obvious by this update, there is no reward for being able to craft as your efforts become easily undermined by the others who have done the same in preparing since everything is so static, NQ or HQ, if you HQ, I HQ and it's all the same gear. What should be implemented on top of having this crafting gear is that those who have over melded should feel they have an edge they can take advantage of over those who didn't overmeld.

The Solution: I feel one thing that would help is if a currently overmelded person had the opportunity to obtain Crafting materia at a quicker rate than the current purple Scrip Spam. With this in mind I feel a system in which the current Master Recipe gear can be used in a synthesis that distills it into "Spiritbond Essence" which can only be used on crafting gear.

Imagine 3 tiers, 1 for ACC, 1 for Head/Hand/Feet and 1 for Weapon/Body/Legs.

ACC Distilling would have the same Craft/Control as current Master Recipes but the HHF and WBL would be higher tier, HHF being something like say Craft 3250/Control 3200 and WBL 3350/3400 however the overall difficulty to HQ wouldn't be as harsh, it would still be around the 10920 quality but it requires a higher base stat in order to perform the action, encouraging players to overmeld so that they can reach a point where they potentially have a quicker way of obtaining materia for future melds.

So basically 3 tiers, each with their own NQ/HQ untradeable item that can be used to add Spiritbond to all crafting gear equipped

Tier 1 would be 5%/10%, Tier 2 8%/15% and Tier 3 13%/25%.

Pretty much meaning that Tier 1 would be 20/10 essence to fully bond the gear, Tier 2 12.5/6.6 to fully meld and 7.6/4 essence to full spiritbond the equipment.

I feel if this alternate route was implemented into crafting that gave us another way to deconstruct the current Master Recipe gear into something useful it would help to stimulate the economy because now you have a more active use for the current legendary materials that will continue to get used meanwhile as it currently stands in it's current form, the gear will flood the market and players will begin to start hoarding the legendary materials again because there is no advantageous active use for it.

In Conclusion. While adding the ability to spiritbond gear without losing the gear was a good step in creating a healthy materia market it inadvertently created a situation in which there was no "material sink" to remove excess materials from the game. If you provide players with the opportunity to have a second use for Classical gear, such as breaking it down to obtain Spiritbond Essence to gain crafting materia quicker it would help to create a much needed Material Sink that the game desperately needs to stop it from feeling like crafting is sadly a pointless side activity since there is currently no proper way to prune the amount of materials that exist in the game.

Unfortunately, it's going to get worse. Because it's hard to know if a material will still be useful because even endgame recipes will use them from time to time.

And from the bits and little pieces of info we have, the inventory system is hamstring by how they store said data so like housing, it counts it as physically being there so server load would be worse if they add more space but we're running out of inventory all together.

Retainers can get expensive as well. And people say "organize and toss what's old" which only gets you so far. On top of that they add more and more manuals, materia levels, dark matter grades, etc. They aleeady tried to help it with the inability to gather HQ materials but still just padding.

Like how we have a currency tab, totems should be stored there. Like the crystal tab in your inventory, they should have something like that for materia. On top of the stat squish, they should have pruned materia grades as well, with the ability to convert x amount of materia into the new tiers.

For dark matter there should be two types: current lvl cap and everything else below the level cap. Same with manuals.

Personally I would really like a crafter/gatherer tab for current expansion tab (or whatever expansion a new player would be on) that stores them on pages with subcategories ease of search.