Quote Originally Posted by Kakure View Post
By slotting us into specialized niches, SE has reduced the amount of people we have to compete with and increased the amount of people we can sell to. The crafting economy is cyclical. Specializations slow the ebb and give us things to sell to other crafters.
I have to disagree. Even with 8 retainers the most hardcore crafters couldn't corner every market. Coupled with crafting on request for higher-skilled crafts (by advertising yourself), you didn't have to subject yourself to the market board to make gil, and specialization only limits gameplay as a whole.

Specialist recipes are a band-aid to hide the fact that the specialist system failed to do what it intended.

Also, one of the main complaints about HW crafting was that the only customers were other crafters. Before specialist skills came out that's all we had to sell to, specialist doesn't change this.