I disagree. In MMO's all items or activities tend to build on top of other activities. IE. Crafters require gatherers to get the ingredients. If the lowest tier is too easy to obtain/do then the entire economy drops down the crapper because of it. Prices are what they are because of the difficulty of doing certain actions at the lowest level. So if gathering were super super easy then crafting would make no profit what-so-ever (we can kinda see this one already). In your example you want to make it easier to meld. This would crash the entire materia market because you would make materia melding too easy. Eventually at some point in the system things need to be difficult. Difficulty or rarity of items is what makes the economy have items that are worth more than most other items and supports supply and demand. This idea would be terrible. Some things are meant to be difficult and it should be that way.