If there are no bots for gathering (which I highly doubt) then this must only be because there is no point in gathering for more than a few hours as you hit gatherer's fatigue and start auto-failing. If I recall correctly, it's 150 sucessfull attempts to start auto-failing and 250 to get a 100% fail-rate with recovery taking about a day. Imagine the chaos if this were lifted.

As a miner and smith, I have just decided that the next time I have iron nuggets to sell, I will put out a shout in the blacksmith's guild (and my linkshells) to offer selling them for really cheap, but qualify the sale to persons with no more than two crafts over rank 40 - I will check the lodestone profile information on anyone who wants to take up the offer.