what's the point of specialist recipe?

[MN_14]

I'm not disagreeing that there are major issues with crafting at the moment. 4* crafting was already considered inaccessible for most back in ARR (even a month after 2.4, the cost of a Supra tool was around 3.5 million gil and a master book was 500k provided that you weren't blowing up more than 2 FC3s per book; a lot of crafters blew up way more than that, artisan's offhands were worth at least 1.5 million in materials). The 4* crafts themselves could cost anywhere from 500k to 3 million gil per item in terms of production costs, so I do have to note that crafting high end items to sell on the market board is generally much cheaper now than back then including specialist recipes like the anima weapon items or the sky pirate's gear. The only exception would be recipes that require gated red scrip materials.

In my opinion, crafting has an overall far larger barrier than before due to the time commitment required if you can't buy your materials or if you decide to craft i170/i180 items. Lower tier items have also gotten really expensive due to general inflation and crafters with lots of gil who are willing to spend a lot if they believe that they can earn a huge return.