How would you change Specialization?

[Roth_Trailfinder]

-Annoying as the recipe locks can be at times, I'd keep them as it really does encourage you to make friends and cooperate.

To be perfectly honest, all it has encouraged me to do is get and keep a small stack (10-ish) of the blank Soul of the Crafter, and then plan out what I want to craft so I do not need to return to a Specialist once I've left it. Plenty of time later on to rebuild that small stack. Right now, in anticipation of T4 materia needs for crafting, I've got 136 RCT. That would have been 14 more Souls of the Crafter had I wanted them. It is not hard to change specializations, merely somewhat time consuming to get the RCS.

The effectiveness of specialist abilities can be fixed, but I don't really see an easy solution for the competition aspect. Even if specializations have abilities that mirror cross class (quick and easy fix that is better than messing around with and balancing 2 different sets of abilities that can be used simultanously), there would still be complaints of omni-crafters dominating every market though more competitve pricing.

You can never fix that competition aspect, not with the current recipe design; with the exception of CUL, which has no materials refined by other classes, anyway. The simple reason is that an omnicrafter will always be able to make those refined materials more cheaply than someone who does not have the right class leveled to produce it, Specialist or no.

Locking recipes behind Specializations does two things. First, it stifles competition. Rather than having everyone able to produce it, you have less than 50% of people able to produce it (depending on exact Specialist breakdown). Second, it increases the cost of the goods to the board buyer. When you have fifteen people producing something and trying to get it to sell, you get into an undercut war. When you only have two people with the right Specialization trying to produce somehting and sell, your undercut war is far less likely to happen, meaning simultaneously a greater profit margin for the crafter, and a deeper gouge into the buyer's wallet.