This has been a great thread so far. It's had a lot of good ideas tossed out. Some of my favorites:

Finding the right balance between crafted and U/U drops. I went into Darkhold 1 night because well, that's all I needed to. There is absolutely no incentive for me to ever step back in there once I finished my quest. Personally I feel we should see something like this; crafted < crafted x1 meld < U/U < crafted x2 meld. From what I've read on these forums a lot of people agree about putting U/U around there. Some have suggested moving U/U above even x2 meld but I think that's a little much. For example if I wanted to x2 meld Cobalt Mitt Gauntlets +AP +Str for DD it would cost me on average just under 5 million gil (that's buying the worst tier IV materia) on my server. Making 5 mil is a much larger time investment than running DH or some other instance a couple of times.

Making the coffer drops from SH more significant. I have no idea why the devs made only Sent gear non U/U and meldable. I think the coffer drops should all be adjusted to be non-U/U and meldable. You want double meld MotMH? Sure, spend the time to farm 5 of them or pay someone who did.

World Spawn NMs dropping crafting mats. I have no idea why this was abandoned. Battlecraft goes out and kills big nasty dragon. Scale drops after fight and this is taken to the linkshell's best crafter. DoL makes a gnarly shield out of it and presents it to the linkshell's Gladiator. This seems so natural an idea for this game yet they put it on the back burner. Of course these items should also have a materia slot on it (You guys spent how many hours hunting that dragon before you got that x2 meld shield?). Time and Effort overcoming significant difficulty should yield a big reward.

Now of course the problems with some of these ideas are they will lead to a rise in RMT. A casual player without hours to spend really wants that shield so he buys some gil and is instantly gratified. How does the dev team allow for these great collaborative items to be created without also creating an incentive to pay RMT for a short cut to the reward? Making everything U/U drops from difficult endgame content means you just cut out almost all incentive for anyone to ever touch DoL and DoH.

Is there any way we can have our cake and eat it too?