distance measurements in the game

[Ashkendor]

I'm willing to bet the Garleans would argue with you. :P I'll bet it would be difficult to engineer complex machinery like mech suits and space ships without exact scientific instrumentation and measurement standards. :P

This. Even the Eorzeans have airships and guns, neither of which would function without precision measurement.

They basically are stealing tech from an earlier civilisation, even the Greeks managed to make.........

Yeah they are "stealing tech", but they're making it on their own. It still wouldn't function without precision parts.

It's an object over 2,000 years old, took another 1,600 years for objects of the same complexity to be reborn. Then we get into the "magic" of XIV, 2 lumps of cobalt ore and 1 lump of iron = 1 cobalt ingot, exactly 2 lumps of cobalt ore and 1 lump of iron, which means every lump has the same purity etc. But they don't, so we just magic up the right sized stuff.

That's just handwavey stuff to make crafting palatably easy instead of ridiculously complex imo.