Last thing the world needs is to increase a player's financial burden in a videogame.

[Artemiz]

and we start treading on very grim wage slavery territory.

And you say I'm the one being "overly fearful"? Sure thing.

I disagree. There are very brief periods where the markets are viable - patches, mostly - but outside of that, prices have been flat since Stormblood. Finding an HQ crafted chestpiece for <100k is not uncommon. The largest driving factor, in my opinion, of the prices is the ease with which new players can access end game crafting. With its streamlined leveling and effective removal of RNG, anyone with the motivation can list 5 HQ DoH tools on the MB at a time to drive the price down.

Several new systems have been introduced since 2.0 to create gil. Some increases are expected, but to say that we are anywhere near a run-away effect is ... Perhaps overly fearful. The only instance where I can imagine a new player might be disadvantaged would be buying gear on a patch day - one of those times where I mentioned prices spike. However, if the concern is that new players are being outpriced from participating in end-game content on patch days, the far simpler solution is to sell raid-ready gear at a vendor rather than siphon gil from the entire population and hope the reduction in purchasing power somehow drives a much larger reduction in supply? I'm doubtful.

A massive difference that you don't seem to be considering is that in 2.0 to create that end game gear for 70k you had to be an omni-crafter. Long before all the easy methods to level crafters had been introduced and leves got buffed so the markets where controlled by half a dozen people on each server. It was a huge commitment to get into a position to even make that gear and most of the players where still leveling combat jobs or doing MSQ.

Fast forward to today and anyone can level a crafter to 80 in a day (omni-crafter no longer required) and start knocking out endgame gear with a macro they found on the internet and a few million gil spent on gear and materia. The market for these items has literally only just really crashed, up until maybe a week ago I couldn't make rings fast enough unless I full timed crafting and they were selling for 120k easily enough. In the last week, maybe two, they have finally crashed down to 50-60k, making them not worth doing once mats are taken into account.

So despite how easy it is to get into a position where you can make these items now, compared to how hard it used to be, 3 months before an expansion you could still make far more money, far more quickly than during 2.0 when the markets were far harder to access.

That's inflation, and a lot of it.