I personally love my melds. I busted my ass for them and can easily hit 3str2vit and 4str1vit thresholds that a lot of tanks go for while having a lot more hp and doing the same dps. Its pretty easy to make money and/or save money in this game, it only took 2 months for me to get a full set, and while that sounds like a long time, i also went into the expac stone-fuck-cold-broke (under 100k gil). Apply the same discipline to gil as you do to tanking and the melds pay for themselves.