I agree with some of this. I don't personally have a problem with the way materia works, but that's probably because I could meld materia to gear while leveling up and generally choose not to because it makes such a small difference for the cost. At least they drastically reduced the variety in catalysts. Now it's just various grades of carbonized matter (and if you can gather yourself you don't even really need to worry about grade I or II) instead of having a different catalyst based on what type of materia you were using (kind of like the mess that is the glamour system).

Getting to 50 is pretty quick, and while I could see people using the glamour system before then, not so much in it's current state. It's probably not fair to defend their decision to make it level 50 on the basis that the system is such crap that you're almost doing people a favor by not letting them mess with it before then...

Crystal shards definitely need a boost. You can farm crystals 50% as fast as shards (using level 30 nodes where you get a single double yield node for shards and only 2 normal nodes for crystals) but no recipes actually require very many crystals, while most recipes require piles of shards. On top of that shards are level 1 regardless of the node so they can't help you level up.

I really wish they'd make the glamour system more sensible. If they still want the prisms and crafters involved, just make vanity slots like everyone wants, but require a prism to equip something in a vanity slot. Also, considering that the prices and effort are exactly the same regardless of the level of the prism, just reduce that to 1 prism per craft. That should fix the mess of juggling several tiers of prisms and allow people to use multi-slot gear for vanity.