Crafting: This is it for me.

[Nalien]

Honestly, this is the way it should be. People shouldn't need huge amounts of gil if they want to raid and do primals. Having it come from battle content is the way to do it.

No, there are two ways they could have handled this;

Firstly, lock powerful crafted gear on the crafter. I take Blacksmith to 60, I pour a lot of effort into gear it up. My reward? Screw you Gerolt. I'll craft my own ultimate weapon thank you very much. Nobody has to have millions of gils to do this, it would just be something crafters can do for themselves to make it feel like they're actually crafting gear, rather than glamour prisms. I'd be able to walk around with my own self made ultimate weapon and feel proud as a Blacksmith as a result. No real reason they couldn't adapt the Collectables system to implement something like this really...

Secondly, copy Final Fantasy XI. That game had an Abjurations system; You would do endgame content, and it had a chance of dropping specific Abjurations (which couldn't be sold/traded). These Abjurations were used along with certain crafted items to produce endgame tier gear. Could very easily adapts that in Final Fantasy XIV; Right now we can craft i180 stuff right? Well, how about letting us take that gear, taking the items used to upgrade AF2, and do the same thing with it? Upgrade that i180 to i210. Would still require you to do the raids to get the best gear, it just gives crafting some validity at endgame.

Either of those works for me. As a crafted, I can make awesome gear, rather than glamours. That's all I want. If it's locked to me, at worse it "forces" people to level crafts to make their own, but if the recipe ends up being worse of a grind than Zenith to Zeta? No problem there. If we continue making the same gear as we currently do, but people are able to upgrade it with raid drops, nobody has to buy the gear to enter raids, it's just something people can do. Both cases end up being cock waving "look how much Gil I have" items that are actually used, rather than glamoured, which is what crafting should be about.