We honestly never needed the whole <Item A (Color A)> <Item A (Color B)> <Item A (Color C)> <Item B (Color A)> thing in the first place. With the dawn of universal dyes the color of the gear should no longer matter at all.

I was thinking about how much work it would be to undo all the redone recipes now and theres actually a very simple thing they can do. Dyed gear currently uses the undyed version + extra materias to make a required level version with extra stats, right? Well just drop the dye out of the recipe entirely and make those "extra stat" versions their own piece of gear.

For example:
Cobalt Cuirass (Red) should be renamed to "Advanced* Cobalt Cuirass". It can keep its restrictions, keep its extra stats, and all that because it would be its own separate piece of gear from the regular Cobalt Cuirass. Then all they need to do is add the ability for us to seek a dye job from an Alchemist to freely change the color of either the regular Cobalt Cuirass or the Advanced Cobalt Cuirass.

This would also allow for the future HQ system to work as intended. All HQ mats would make an HQ Cobalt Cuirass. An HQ Cobalt Cuirass + HQ mats would = HQ Advanced Cobalt Cuirass.

*"Advanced" could be replaced with any adjective that implies it is upgraded. "Upgraded" would work too.