Quote Originally Posted by LuxLex View Post
The weird thing about "veteran" gatherers saying that there are "too many items" is that when I was trying to level cook I had to buy ALMOST EVERYTHING from an npc because botanists didn't feel like it was worth their time (or something) to sell cooking ingredients. Trying to find a tomato, or any spice was an utter nightmare. I had to take up botany myself to stop myself from losing to much money on leveling cooking. In my experience no other crafting job had to buy most of their items at npc to level.
That is due largely in part to the fact that the food buffs are extremely unintuitive and complex and generally worthless (there are exceptions of course that prove the rule), meaning that no one was buying food stuffs meaning no one was making food stuffs meaning no one cared to supply the raw mats because they would just sit there (again, with exceptions that are used solely for grinding).