Would it help inventory space at all if it was text based like GC Quartermaster?

[Sylvain]

If I remember right, the reason inventory space is an issue in FF14 is because every time you move an item or do something, you send data of your whole inventory and not simply what has changed.
Expanding the inventory size means that every data packet is bigger because there are more items. When you expand that to every single player, that's a lot of useless data being processed for no real reason. (this is why for instance the chocobo saddle bag is like a mini retainer, so that when you want to craft it doesn't add up 70 slots of item to read when it looks if you have the mats)

Considering the new glamour system is also capped at 200 items, I believe it must have been coded in such a way that making it less data-vore would be a very hard task.

I also believe that the whole retainer thing doesn't help to have items on different list all around.

Regarding cooking and other job having too many mats.
This is actually a huge problem. We carry too many crap around because there are so many mats. Unfortunately that's a lot of different item id.
Perhaps one day, one thing they could do would be to simplify crafting / gathering from 1 to 60 to reduce the amount of different materials.

Another thing that could be done would be to allow HQ and NQ to stack together. The fact that every item often take two slots is significant.

There are plenty of things they could do, I wonder if they've actually looked at how other mmo do.
I'm sure they did, Y.P tends to be very aware of what is done in other games. I personally really loved the mats system from GW2.