The key issue from my perspective is that 208 Normal Materials for a week's worth of Gathering Favours means that you effectively can provide materials for 1.155 crafters who have maxed their week's worth of Crafting Red Scrips, or leaving you with ~70 Red Scrips 'banked' on a weekly basis. This doesn't really make sense with how readily you'll come by counterfoils, or by the normal Gatherer:Crafter ratio works.

In theory, folk could burn the Rare Materials and three Crafting Red Scrip tokens to burn the disparity for HQ mats, but I don't think that's practical or even desirable over the long term -- you end up losing Red Crafter's Tokens on too much of the gear compared to the i180 prices.

And, frankly, 11 hours and 15 minutes is a huge amount of time investment weekly, especially when added to the three to six hours it takes to get the Red Gatherer Scrips to start with. That's two hours a day every day minimum, and well outside of the time cost for crafters.