The artisan gear is pretty useless as soon as 3.1 came out for anyone that didn't have their crafts leveled already cause the Archaeonskin has better stats and is cheaper. On Balmung the artisan gear sells for like 300k and the Archaeonskin sells for like 50k yea your market for artisan gear was lost right there. Looking at the retainers they had nothing to do with the loss of income of those items.