It's expensive and kinda wasteful to perfectly overmeld level 50 gear, and expensive to buy/craft artisan gear unless you go for the NPC token reward version. It takes a few hours to get up to 52-54, and when you slap on those new gear you will already have quite higher stats than pentamelded level 50 gear.

I admit I recently perfectly overmelded a full set of level 50 forager gear because I was bored, but I was sitting on over 100 mil gil due to end game crafting. If I was stuck at level 50 crafting I'd probably only have 10-20 mil instead.