Quote Originally Posted by Alien_Gamer View Post
In general the pattern seems to go scrip gear < crafted gear < augmented scrip gear < pentamelded crafted gear in terms of highest stats. Regular scrip gear will let you craft any of the one star stuff, crafted should let you craft the 2 star (maybe with a few cheap melds or food), augmented scrip and pentamelded should let you do 3 star at this point. Your ability to HQ the items will suffer a bit with lower stats but its still possible to HQ a lot of non end game stuff even with just scrip gear.

But if you want to HQ the 3star stuff reliably, your best bet is pentamelded crafted gear.
Yes, but if you look at the time to get yellow scripts for a single piece and augment it, I personally don't think it is worth the time to gil ratio. But that is my two cents. For the topic on hand, the choice is yours to make.