Normal mode raids: please don’t settle on this loot system...

[Vidu]

You need to get two gatherers to 70 and unlock the regional folklore books for them, which take 50 tokens from rowena, aka 2500 red scrips each. You also need to gear those gatherers pretty high, because under a certain amount your HQ chance for those node items becomes 0, making it much harder for your crafter friends to make the HQ ingredients needed to HQ a 4 star piece. And you need your crafter buds to have all crafts at 70, for a set of gear due to splitting it up among the differnt crafts.

You're looking at this the wrong way - as if crafting was only released with this patch, when the reality is that any serious endgame crafter or gatherer (and when I say "Find a crafter friend" I mean someone whos already into crafting) has already done all of that. When the patch dropped all I had to do was grabbing the new mastercrafterbooks because I had half a year already to level and gear my crafters. We had about 2 or 3 months to get the ala mhigan gear and melds ready. Its nothing new and nothing that caught anyone by surprise. Nothing that just happend with this patch. I dont know how long you're playing but I was fully aware that I'd have all of 4.1 to prepare myself for 4.2.
You're looking at this, starting at zero - when in reality most people who are intrested in crafting/gathering wont start there.
Non-crafters and non-gatheres can also still supply their crafters with mats - bought with creation tomes. Get the ones for your gear and then the same amount again as payment for your crafter! Or ask them if they need/want anything that you can buy with GC-seals!
There are also low-level gathering items that are still useful for crafters and that dont require you to be a level 70-fully-melded-gatherer (for example: the current go-to raidfood, Crimson Cider, uses a lot of level 60-65 gathering mats). Just leveling one crafter and getting some HQ 290-non-melded gear should be more than enough to do weekly turn ins for Naago, earning you yellow scrips that you can spend on mats again... Dont make it so black and white with either its nothing at all or you've pentamelded the most recent gear.

...on the matter of folklore books: yeah, you need red scrips for them, but you're earning those already if you're smart and level from 60 to 70 by doing collectables. Tones of exp, no waste of leves and more than enough red scrips to buy the books, some cordials and exp-manuals.

You could also look at Sigma NM in the way off: To even get one piece of loot from there you need to level a character to 70, do all the story, do an additional quest, do Omega (I assume?), run the content and then win the piece of loot!