Yes the specialist is doing -some- hindering in terms of making less people craft the highest level stuff, but I'd argue that the real problem is the fact that you're forced to make a decision every week what to do with the red crafter scrips. You can either continue down the 10 week path to earning a set of gear which, if youre a new crafter starting from nothing, is your realistic option to reach stats to craft sky pirates, or buy/gather gatherer favor materials to buy the mats required to craft crafter gear. That crafter gear would be in turn sold to other crafters to gear up and help everyone else reach the top faster.

The problem is that the scrips are so limiting, forcing you to gear up using the same materials needed for crafting, that no one has any money to pay for those expensive materials. You're forced into a situation to buy the gear from npcs first for 10/20/30 weeks depending on how many specialists you want to gear up first. And then when you finally after weeks reach a point to sell the materials like dryad sap or moonbeam silk, no one has that kind of money to pay for those materials and attempt to make gear hq, because that gear must be hq or its essentially worthless. Why take the risk of failing an hq and throwing away 5 million gil when you could have geared up further? And because of this situation where people dont take the risk, or cant afford the risk, or cant afford to spend 5m per piece on buying the gear, very little progress of other crafters gearing up faster then scrips is happening.

The old method of gathering the 4 star allagan materials from farming coil, compared to this current method of using the same pool of scrips, was a better system. I think it was an ideal system because it lets combat classes gain a source of income, which is what should be happening between combat and crafting classes. More interaction between the two, not less.