RNG is ok, the issue is the other lack of variety to obtain gear. They pretty much block crafters but being competitive stopping their item level growth at 70 while through dungeons, trials and tokens players can earn ilevel 90 gear with somewhat ease.

The trick isn't to remove RNG but to provide more means to obtain gear, it should always have a crafting variety, RNG variety and token variety. Three different ways, one where you use materials, some special loot dropped in dungeons, some purchased with tokens to make a unique piece of gear that you can add materia to.

Then the RNG variety, gear which you get through dungeons that is strong but you are unable to choose which one you want.

Then the token variety, cost a bit to get but you get to choose what you want.

The biggest issue however is how they handled crafted gear, by making the means to obtain it way to expensive compared to the ease of obtaining items of the same ilevel. Where you might only spend 400 tokens to get this one item to crafted it you would need 800-1k token. While the idea behind it was to have the community of players sell these items via the market ward, it fell flat because what's the point of this ilevel 70 gear when there is alrdy ilevel 90 gear which can easily replace it if you just keep farming mytho.

Where there is no limit on the amount of tokens you can obtain for the ilevel 70 gear so what purpose is there to craft these ilevel 70 gear when the amount of tokens needed is 2-3 times more than it would cost to just buy the gear with tokens.

While yes it's cheaper now, the damage is already done and there are now even more events where one can obtain ilevel 90 gear.

Hopefully they can remedy this with the next patch and actually give crafters more love in the economy department.

What they overlooked is very simple, if you make the options to craft the piece of gear cheaper than the cost of the item itself, such as if it cost 500 tokens to obtain ilevel 70 hands, then the crafted materials should only cost 250 tokens to obtain. Since there are still other items involved in making it, plus you then revitalize the materia market because now players will be more willing to invest in these items but only if they are at least competitive with what's top tier.

So with the next patch they should at least have something in the sense of if dungeons go up to 100/110 then the crafted gear should at least be 95-105 depending on how high they take item level next update.

This way the crafted gear provides another stepping stone to help players get through content while still leaving players with the option to obtain better gear. This gear in question would be for players who might need that extra 5-10 item level to defeat content, while more hardcore players might suffice with item lv 90 gear.