I just...don't care anymore.

[Sollux]

They didn't do a very good job of discouraging omnicrafting with 3.0 anyway, to be honest. Individual DoH classes depend far more on other DoH mats than they ever have before, and Specialization abilities don't compare to the power of the old suite of level 50 abilities well at all. I never liked being an omnicrafter, so I was looking forward to Specialization, but they didn't really make it worthwhile.

Unfortunately I think that a lot of people loved Crafting BECAUSE they could omni-craft, and their methods of discouraging omni-crafting have actually worked so well that it has discouraged a lot of people from Crafting in general. Their intent (In my opinion) with 3.0 was to discourage omni-crafting and encourage us to rely on other people which would in turn revitalize the market and keep it from stagnating because most people can craft everything themselves. This doesn't mean omni-crafting is impossible, and it will certainly get easier as time goes by, but the length of the grind means that the market will be active much longer than it was previously.

The main problem is the fact that Combat classes have very little incentive to spend gil on anything from Crafting/Gathering which has removed a HUGE chunk of potential gil from the market, which leaves much less incentive to Craft or Gather, which in turn means less mats on the market, which means higher prices on the mats that ARE on the market, which means most Crafters are Gathering their mats themselves, which means less people buying said mats, which makes the market stagnant.

As for Specialist skills, I may get some flak for saying this but I think they're exactly where they need to be. They were never MEANT to be as powerful as their respective lvl 50 counterparts, otherwise their would be no real reason to level any other Crafting class. They're there as a stepping stone to be able to craft Endgame recipes but still have an incentive to level the other classes.

[Alahra]

Their intent (In my opinion) with 3.0 was to discourage omni-crafting and encourage us to rely on other people which would in turn revitalize the market and keep it from stagnating because most people can craft everything themselves.

I think that was their intent, yes. On the surface I don't have much issue with the intent, but the implementation has been awful. Since most folks are used to being able to omnicraft (and there are a lot of crafters that focus solely on crafting), they naturally leveled everything to 60 anyway, and there are still a lot of incentives to do so, and essentially no incentives to specialize at this point in time.

The scarcity of materials means that the simplest way to craft ones own i170 sets, for instance, is to omnicraft, so that you can make all of the components. With how scarce things are, relying on other crafters just simply doesn't work that well, as you need ways to mitigate costs as much as possible to make the whole enterprise worth it.