While I find it very fulfilling to make my own armor and weapons from scratch as a crafter, I agree that gear found from raids, dungeons, NM's, etc. needs to be a lot stronger, or be able to also have Materia attached to it, simply for the fact that it takes a lot more effort to cooperate with an 8-person party to take down strong enemies than it does to gather or buy materials, and then repeatedly click on Standard Synthesis to make something. I was also hoping that I could convert my old lower-level Unique/Untradeable gear into Materia as well, because I have weapons like Flametongue and Warden's Dagger that aren't useful to me anymore as a Lv50 GLA. It seems like such a waste to just NPC sell them for 1 Gil or throw them away...

That said, I anxiously await the day when crafters can actually start building housing, airships, work on hamlet defenses, cooperate together in parties, etc. It'd make the jobs a lot more useful and fun.