Quote Originally Posted by Pandastirfry View Post
you actually had the most important question in your first paragraph... really the only question worth answering " Am I going to want any of those items any time soon?"
But that question can only be asked after you've spent a significant amount of time researching the previous two questions: "What recipes need it directly? What recipes need it indirectly for one of their intermediate ingredients?" Those are what tell you which items you're even talking about. Only after you figure out which items this thing in your inventory would be needed for can you ask whether you're going to want to make any of those items any time soon.

And in determining whether you're going to want to make them, you have to consider which classes of your own may soon want to use them (and whether they'd be an upgrade from what you currently have for each of those classes), plus whether they're used for leves or GC supply missions. And since a single ingredient may be involved in making a wide variety of final items, there's a lot of things to check before you can determine whether to keep or toss even one ingredient that saves just a single slot if you do toss it. Then repeat the whole time-consuming process for the next ingredient you picked up, or repeat it all 350 times if you want to clean out your retainers' inventory.

I'll agree with you that once you can finally manage to answer the question of whether you'll want any of the things this can make any time soon, you could eliminate most of the common junk you pick up along the way while playing. Indeed I said as much in my previous post. My point was about not wanting to have to do all that research every time I play.