Quote Originally Posted by Spellbinder View Post
As outlined in the post, one would expect a certain suffix to have a certain effect. For example, spells denoted by -ja having X effect. However, that's not the case in FFXIV. The suffix only tells you in what order it was learned.

The same with materia. The suffix only tells you its ranking. However, the ranking wasn't even unified between materia and spells. There's also another set of items that uses these suffixes, but it alludes me at the moment.

But the main point of the explanation was, because the suffix being used for spells, materia, etc. is only telling you the order or ranking, they decided to use unified numbering across the board for everything rather than letters that aren't unified across the board.
While that all makes sense, it's still a _little_ strange because the Japanese is basically the same (just a random suffix telling you order with no inherent meaning). If they were making a global decision it would make sense to use numbers in the JP version as well. So it does sound like the EN localization team makes some of these decisions independently for reasons other than straight translation (which is fine, but part of the answer to the original question in the thread).