Or they could just give you an option of "builds" for gear before you start synthing, like how the menu comes up if you put in mats that can make multiple items. A system like this would probably have to wait until they revamped the wards so you could see an item's individual stats while searching (ie: variable stats on materia or materia-slotted gear).

Thinking about it now, maybe the dye=stats thing is a placeholder for such a system, and once its implemented we would have gear colored the way we want seperate from the stats.