Cordial is now available from GC vendors because Square realized that having nobody sell it is really incredibly stupid.

Gathering shards in the numbers necessary for significant crafting work becomes astronomically tedious and drawn out as you approach level 50. Most things in the last ten levels of crafting recipes require several multiple-tiered material crafts each, pushing shard requirements for something like, say, a full set of Patrician's crafting gear (which is only five items for the main gear slots) up to a grand total of 179 shards.

Even worse, trying to produce any significant quantity of the higher-tier materials for sale pushes you up to completely ludicrous shard requirements. To get the tier V crafting achievement for crafting 3,000 level 41-50 recipes would require at absolute least a whopping total of eighteen thousand shards. It's not even remotely outlandish to say that the primary source of RMT gil in the game is bots harvesting and selling staggering quantities of shards, because most actual human players simply don't have the patience to do it.

What makes the whole situation more frustrating is that the crystal and cluster requirements for the level 55 and 70 crafts are barely half what the highest tier of normal crafts require in shards, which is, frankly, a much more reasonable level.