To be fair, Yoshida said that the hunts weren't even planned. I don't mean not planned for 2.3, I mean not planned at all. They decided to design them and implement them some time between the finalization for 2.2 and the introduction for 2.3 because of how many people were asking for open world NMs. If the rewards weren't to upgrade gear to the current highest ilvl then it wouldn't have been a problem.

The reason NMs worked in FFXI is because they dropped specific items, not a currency every job used for end-game gear. That is the biggest oversight they made with the system.