I'm still prepping for my first three star crafting set. Just to put it in perspective, what I still need is the Artisans tool (almost 100k just in shards, before the turn in mats and failures), and just last night I bought the last of my materia I needed to hit my caps. A Control IV, a Control III, 2 Control IIs, and a Craftmanship III. All but one of those is an overmeld with a good chance of failure. That set of materia cost me over 400k, and I'll likely lose at least 1 or 2 of them, possibly much worse.

My AF is already sporting about 400-500k worth of melds as it is. I think SE has realized that allowing everyone to be a master at everything was a bad idea. It results in market flooding, a lack of crafter interdependency, and a depressed economy. But rather than say "you can't have more than 2 crafts at 50", they've just raised the cost of maxxing a craft out to so high a point that 90% of people can't AFFORD to to have more than 1 or 2 top level crafts.