materia and combat classes.

[Lerris]

what i mean is the only people who nead to really "waste" anything are the combat classes, they must have their gear "consumed" (aka: it goes away) to do our part of the system. Crafters equip it (loose nothing) gathers get them from mining or w/e (loose nothing).

i think the only reason it goes away is because they cant come up with a way of making the gear show its been used (maybe a coding thing?)

If they can store the affinity number per piece of gear, they can store whether it's been used.

The problem this solves is the problem of market saturation of non-consumable items.
Is it a waste? Even if a combat class doesn't need a materia, it gives them a way to sell that iron short sword when they're done with it, either as a materia , or due to increased demand as iron short swords are consumed.