On paper, I like this idea. In practice, it is simply annoying. Can't it just be changed to "Requires four active members", rather than requiring them in the workshop? Given they don't even need to be Free Company members I just find the whole thing kind of silly...

Either I have to waste peoples time by randomly bringing them into the Workshop to advance progress, then gather up the next set of materials and do the same thing again. Or I gather everything in advance and do things efficiently, but then I get Excellent progression and require less materials, which ends up being annoying. Another thing is the materials needed... Two things bother me; The level requirement, and the quantity. The level requirement is (currently, hopefully) blocking a lot of people in my Free Company from really participating, and the amount needed is solo level quantity in most cases.

What I'd quite like to see is the quality aspect dropped in favour of a two tier system; To increase the progress, we have the current set of material requirements. To increase the quality, we have a separate set of lower level items. This way, pretty much anyone can participate to increase the quality. People who can participate for the progress can, but they don't have to be amazing and HQ everything to do so. With lots of quantity required in the quality section, low levels can get a fair amount of EXP while indirectly helping progress. There is (apparently, I've yet to hit it) a cap on how much you can turn in, so that alone should add incentive to have multiple members work on it, the requirement for a light party is just arbitrary and silly.