Why do the Egis appearance look awful and unimpressive

[Pandastirfry]

Actually it has zero basis in lore whatsoever.

The premise of primals isn't that you need a ton of crystals and/or lives to summon them, it's that they're stronger the more of those things they have. We know this because in the main story quest both Ifrit and Titan are summoned by the cries of only 3 of their respective beast tribe members, none of which had any crystals in their possession that we know of. The only lore that exists to justify the egis is the lore they added specifically for summoner quests, in other words AFTER they decided to go the egi route.

Uh...you need to pay attention to the story better, The Amal'ja Had been stealing shipments of crystals and kidnapping people prior to that in order to summon Ifrit, we just happened to be there at the culmination of their efforts, same goes for the Summoning of Titan, they also draw upon the collective belief of all their tempered thralls, not just the one doing the summoning. Only the Ixal had summoned the Primal previous to us showing up, but yet again the stealing of crystal shipments/kid napping of people was a major theme of the quests leading up to the fight. This is spelled out in the main story. in the 1.0 story line it was even pointed out the the Twelve can also be summoned in a similar fashion and was even floated by the Path of the Twelve/Scions of the Seventh Dawn as a possible solution to the whole Meteor Problem. but that it is just as detremental to the aetheric balance of the world as summoning the Primals, and would make us "No better than the Beast Tribes".

The lore for Summoner is that we're not calling upon belief or the power of the crystals. We're not summoning a willing Primal. we're forcibly binding a small amount of the aetheric essence of the Primal. Basically unlike WoW's Warlock or FFXI's Summoner who make contracts or blood pacts with their summons, we are, to use a more accurate term, "enslaving" the primal's essence. One could argue that FFXIV's Summoner is actually more "evil" than WoW's Warlock.