I've noticed this with some of my crafting gear as well. The higher level and newer crafting head/gloves don't have stats comparable to my Dated Linen Wedge Cap or the Linen Short Gloves. I know we are supposed to embed materia into the newer items but considering I have yet to to see anyone put more than 1 materia into an item without it exploding, well lets just say I'm sticking with my Dated gear.

The new gears should have stats comparable to what they are replacing and only if a person wants to make their gear better than what they had and currently have should they go embed materia into it. Not all of us wish to take part in this Materia craze but it seems we are all forced to unless we want to deal with being considered gimped or having less stats from what we had before.

The only thing that I'm happy about with Materia is the fact that I can now take some decent All Classes gloves and dump the T4 MP+ materia into them and get some mage hands for my Conj. Before that there were only decent mage hands for THM (mitts) and nothing for Conj!