Variance in player skill is hurting FFXIV's itemization design.

[Nalien]

Imho, the way to add spell customization would be materia.

Would such materia come from gear? My main concern is how utterly dull gear is in this game, someone commented earlier, you can essentially figure out BiS and focus solely on that before the servers even come back up... That's why I'd go for a IX style solution, over materia... That and IX > VII, IX > All... BiS would likely remain as it is, but something like the dungeon gear (which is entirely worthless as gear) could see value with such stats, I'd want to get that gear for stats rather than glamour/seals...

That 100 times.

But I fear that many just want to be the special snowflake thinking that SE should dedicate more time designing stuff for the top 1% players and less for the remaining 99% who spend the same $ to play this game.

I, at least, just want all gear to be more interesting... I don't want something like Nidhogg weapons to be specifically special while everything else remains as is, I want every piece of gear to have something extra... IXs system is really perfect for that, everyone would have some stats unlocked just by playing with whatever gear they already use, and with a limited amount of AP to set such stats, the "top 1%" would essentially simply be getting more options for optimization, something I honestly doubt the majority of players care about... If people cared about optimization being locked to the high end raiders, I'd see people actually using Food and Potions... All it does (for me, at least), is provide more value to all gear and give me a greater justification to do more content. I'd be more interested in content like Nidhogg, and when I do dungeons I'd actually be interested in the gear, rather than just wishing the chests rewarded 1,000 company seals instead to cut out the middle man...