My personal view is SE took a lazy approach to end game crafting and gathering without actually thinking why gatherers and crafter's play those classes. They've look at end game battle classes where the meta is to max gear to deal more damage and thought "lets make end game gathering and crafting about gearing up, players only play to get better gear don't they?", but IMO this is not want gather's or crafter's want. They want end game to be about playing the marketboard, economics, making gil and helping out friends with their crafting and gathering skills. The scrip system does not allow for any of this as anything from the highest tier of crafting will be so exorbitantly expensive that normal players will not be able to afford it, and even if they could; wouldn't since they can gear up so fast with law, alexander (normal) and esoterics.
IMO the way SE should have done red scrips:
1) Capped red scripts should only have ever been used as an alternative way to get high level gathering and crafting gear in a cheap but slow progression sort of way.
2) Capping access to high level crafting materials behind the same system is the main problem and has killed off end game crafting/gathering - take materials out of the red script system and put them somewhere else either:
a) Blue scrips since these are not capped
b) Level 60 dungeons drops (gets DoW/DoW back into the crafting cycle)
c) Centurio seals/tomestones of law (gets DoW/DoW back into the crafting cycle)
d) Grand company seals
e) New gathering folklore nodes or existing
f) All of the above
If they won't make the above changes then uncapping red scrips will offer a less satisfactory improvement but at least removes the weekly limit on raw materials.
If they won't uncap red scrips then the battle class gear from crafting should be equivalent to Esoterics i200 and upgradable from savage drops in the same way to i210.
Effort =/= reward atm and the frankly the actual "game" of crafting and gathering (at the highest level/endgame) is no longer fun![]()