I will say, from my own experience, that breaking into HW crafting and gathering has been a royal pain. As someone who never shelled out the gil for the max melds on all my stuff I was caught in a loop where I couldn't make better gathering gear because I didn't have the mats, and getting the mats for it was a royal pain for one reason or another. Never mind HQ for any of it. I finally had to get a guildie help me get HQ gear for gathering once I scraped my way to 51.