Coccoons (the ones that replaced crawler coccoons which i forget the name) still sell for a pretty good amount at least on my server, plus every once in a while i get some sort of floss that happened to sell for 300K each, so the notion of botanist retainer being no good is not entirely true.
I have 4 Retainers mainly a 4th one due to storage issues but my retainers are Archer/Bard, Miner and Botanist. The 4th one i never bothered adding a class yet