Quote Originally Posted by Lambdafish View Post
are you really bringing lore into this? well then its actually a more complicated process than that, from what I gather, there is no hole and there is no ball, you are using the aetheric energy from the materia stone and imbuing the weapon or armour with it, in a sense you are augmenting the gear with aether to increase its strength, that sounds like something that only someone with a knowledge of how the gear is constructed would be able to do.

Materia melding as a concept is far different from how it was in FFVII, these are two different universes.
Sounds like a copout excuse since some gear obviously has materia slots visible on it via the gear description. When you overmeld however you are using crafting techniques to meld more slots in. If you did not overmeld those slots wouldn't even show up to begin with.