Recommended gear feature, recommending wrong gear?

[Niwashi]

Only after I removed the materia from the 290 gear did it recommend the 340 gear.

Thanks. That's good to know. It means the feature isn't just looking at a fixed list of items. It's actually analyzing their current stats, including stats that are added with materia.

Item Level gives a rough approximation of what's likely to be better, if all else is equal. But where the NQ version of an item, its HQ version, and either of them melded with appropriate materia may all have very different stats (but still the same ilvl for all of them), ilvl is far from reliable by itself.