Knew it. This is precisely why I benched my 2nd anima weapon @ this step. Stopped gathering tokens at about 10 each and refused to pay for the overpriced HQ crafted items (not like the mats are even hard to come by) when I knew that at the very least the items would be NQ trade-ins (and now it's GC token-able as well).
No gil wasted, no surprises here.