Is materia even that important? Or does everything just, for the most part, scale?

[Viridiana]

Defeat the next endgame "raid" naked, on a somewhat random party of people that haven't run the fight 50+ times, and then we talk about stats being useless as you say.

This group is not going to lose because of gear. Their first and overwhelming problem will be lack of coordination and cohesion.

^^This. As it stands, this game has zero gear checks. I'm not asking for anything as obvious as a Patchwerk, but it'd be damn nice to have something where the gear is actually essential.