1 Materia makes any crafted item better than any NM/Raid/Dungeon item. Why?

[SodaPop]

The factor you're forgetting is skill/learning curve. One activity can be performed by any idiot (or an extremely simple bot) and one cannot. The number of people skilled enough to defeat Ifrit and obtain loot from him is much much smaller than the number of people skilled enough to grind spiritbond/farm catalysts. You want to reward effort exclusively, but that's not how the real world works. Skill matters, and it should be reflected in the balancing of rewards for skill-oriented content.

Only about 2 people in the game need to demonstrate any kind of skill by formulating a workable strategy for killing new content like that everyone else just needs to not be mentally deficient and pay attention.

We really don't need more e-peen waving people who think they're superior just because they spend a lot of time on these things.

Only other time I can think of where skill would be involved would be to make up for someone else's screw up.