Well staying on topic with putting materia on ALL gear, Nero from the German forums has put up a thread (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...are-Ex-Materia) detailing an idea of his which appears to have gotten some positive dev. attention.

I've yet to have a German friend fully translate this for me so please correct me if I'm misunderstanding something that Google Translate told me xD

The basic idea from what I can tell is a U/U tier of materia (called Tier V) which can only drop from NMs, at a reduced drop rate, obv. This materia has stronger stat bonuses than what we have now, and even a suggested Haste-style materia. Since it's U/U, you would obv. need to have a bazaar meld request system put in, which we need anyways.

The special materia would only be able to be melded to U/U items, such as Ifrit's Weapons. Nero even had the % of success for forbidden materia on U/U mapped out (100%, 50%, 25%, 10%, 5%); assuming that it's so forgiving because of the difficulty of obtaining the materia/item in the first place.

I think that this would be a great idea, mainly for the following reasons:

1) It adds relevance to old NMs. You could add the first wave of Tier V materia to current NMs like Dodore, Great Buffalo, and Batraal, who are receiving less attention as of late since Ifrit's taking up the spotlight. New materia can be added to NMs from past patches as new content is released so that there's always a reason to go back and farm Ifrit or Batraal or Uraeus for a couple weeks, depending on what materia you want.

2) Gives U/U weapons/armor from NMs prevalence over crafted gear, but only if people work hard enough for it. HQ gear with forbidden materia will still be better than, say, an Ifrit's Harpoon. But, if someone decided that they're willing to farm certain NMs long and hard enough, they'll be able to add the special materia to their Harpoon, making it better than the crafted piece. This is especially important for NM/coffer U/U armor, which currently isn't better (with VERY few exceptions) than crafted pieces WITHOUT materia.

If you support the idea, I suggest you go to Nero's thread and rate it up!