The crafting grind

[Aeyis]

Well either I have really really good luck with favors or people try a single favor and complain that they got under the average yield, generalizing the entirety of favors.

You got below average yield, which leads me to believe your experience isnt that much. (not enough to average out) Average is set around 3.5, altho that does to some extend depend on the type of item you are gathering.

...and I'm certainly not taking the cheap way out by using a set of favors.

Ofcourse you are. 7 might seem like a fine number when you call it a ''set''. But you dont farm these by activating a set. You farm them per single favor. In which case the yield (in my example) would be 2,1,1,1,2. Or 3 yields of 1, and 2 of 2.

In addition, this was obtained with high route efficiency. Someone new to doing favors would more likely have obtained something like 1,0,0,1,1.

If you want to break that down per favor, that's two items per favor that you need to get bare minimum in order to reach the items necessary to get the materials from the splendors vendor.

No. Because you also need to have both mining and botany types. Meaning that you need on average 4 items to break even. (2 red gathering tokens per 2 red crafting tokens)

In only one favor out of at least 60-70 favors I have done have I ever gotten only one item out of a single favor.

They call it RNG.

People are so afraid of RNG being against them, which is my ultimate point, that the sheer lack of people actually doing favors is causing the entire market to inflate to obscene levels.

People are afraid of doing them for good reason. Because it's all too possible to draw the short end stick. And unlike myself most people will not have 50+ red gathering tokens they can use to obtain the materials they need. They will only have 9 if they just started out.

. The melds only cost me 1-2 million

Melds are significantly higher depending on your servers economy. I do not envy anyone that has to meld when Command IVs are selling for 150-180k. Red scrips equipment makes it somewhat easier for anyone that opted to go for those first. With the disadvantage being it only made it easier for one class.

The grind isn't even that hard - people are making it out to be much worse than it is. It takes about an hour one day a week to max red crafting scrips.

Not hard, but time-consuming. And it is. Not because of favors, not because of red crafting scrips, not because of red gathering scrips, not because of Aethersand, not because gathering materials for red crafting scrips.
But because you need to do all of those. Each week. In addition to your normal activities.
Because of the weekly caps on red scrips you either do the mandatory grind or fall behind.