Using common sense, a crafted piece of gear should cost roughly the same number of tomestone items as its DL equivalent. So, 2-3 for accessories, 4-5 for body would make sense. The idea seems to have been that, while the crafted gear would be overall superior, it would take significantly more work to make/meld, and the DL gear is "good enough".

Unfortunately, lots of Legacy players came over with items like Coke and Potash. It seems like the increase in item requirement was to throttle the legacy servers more than the non-legacies, and we just fell victim to SE's "don't do any tweaking based on type of server" policy. Interestingly, the same policy is what has led to the rise in RMT on non-legacies thanks to no real way to generate gil at 50, where as the issue on legacy servers is a surplus of gil.