whats the point of crafting...

[Mediave]

While I can totally understand the reason for not allowing us to craft gear equivalent to the highest tier gear available, I do have some concerns here.

Materia - Is all but useless leveling up, as the main scenario is -very- easy and all content there in can be completed with minimal difficulty even in gear several levels below it. This needs to come into play much more in end game, allowing player to better spec their characters where they otherwise cannot.

Crafted iLvl 70 gear - The cost to craft this also seems disproportionately large (especially in the case of the DRG set, for instance, which requires far more of the tome materials than the other sets do). If you compare how much philosophy it takes to craft a piece of ilvl 70 gear, compared to how many pieces of DL you could obtain with those tomes, it seems hardly fair, especially since ilvl 70 is not the best in the game.

[Fantasy9]

While I can totally understand the reason for not allowing us to craft gear equivalent to the highest tier gear available, I do have some concerns here.

Materia - Is all but useless leveling up, as the main scenario is -very- easy and all content there in can be completed with minimal difficulty even in gear several levels below it. This needs to come into play much more in end game, allowing player to better spec their characters where they otherwise cannot.

Crafted iLvl 70 gear - The cost to craft this also seems disproportionately large (especially in the case of the DRG set, for instance, which requires far more of the tome materials than the other sets do). If you compare how much philosophy it takes to craft a piece of ilvl 70 gear, compared to how many pieces of DL you could obtain with those tomes, it seems hardly fair, especially since ilvl 70 is not the best in the game.

Exactly This^^