CUL level 50 quest, requires better gear than the reward?

[Vidu]

I can assure you that it isnt - its been a few years since I completed those quests but I do recall that I didnt had the finished and fully melded BiS-gear at this time.

This sounds more like you're not knowing the crafting-system and how to craft well enough, so I would dare to say that the difficulty is working as intended, as in showing you that you need to improve your "player"-skills instead of your character-skills. Ofcourse you could always just postpone the quests and keep leveling your cul and buy cheap vendor-gear in Heavensward areas for level 50+.
And after checking your lodestone-profile I would advice you to pay your GC a visit to invest some GC-seals into crafting-gear thats better than ilvl1-shoes without any crafting-stats at all.

From all your previous threads and posts you seem to be just learning the basics of crafting and gathering in this game. The system is actually fairly easy and once you hit max-level you'll be able to just use macros to craft whatever you want. But for now you shouldnt expect things to just fall in your lap without learning how the systems work.

Buying HQ-items should work by the way - are you sure you bought the correct stuff?

Edit: I also dont know much about WoW and the crafting-system there but if I'm not mistaken you can only pick up a limited amount of classes, right? Well, this isnt the case in FFXIV - specially for crafters and specially for crafters in ARR (but to an extend in HW and SB aswell, even though they tried to ease that a bit) you are basically required to make use of crossclass skills, aka you have to level up other crafting-jobs to get those vital skills. My advice would be to get every crafter at least to level 15 (should be easy enough) and at the very least carpenter to level 50 to get some basic skills that are pretty much required for crafting.
If you want to make a career as crafter (or even if you only want to be able to crafter for yourself) you WILL need every class at max level, not just for the skills but for the syngery aswell. Obviously you didnt notice this with cul, but most other crafters rely on each other for materials (weaver needs the leather the leatherworker makes and so on).

So while you can finish the quest with level appropriate gear (ilvl1 glamour-shoes are NOT level appropriate), getting the right crossclass skills aswell as an understanding of the crafting mechanics might even help more.
FFXIV-system is build on the idea that you level every crafting job - and while HW and SB added skills that allow single-job-crafting more easly, thats not really the way to go.

[SamSmoot]

And after checking your lodestone-profile I would advice you to pay your GC a visit to invest some GC-seals into crafting-gear thats better than ilvl1-shoes without any crafting-stats at all.

Thanks for this. I had forgotten about GC gear after it became obsolete for my DPS main. You just saved me many thousands of gil.

Buying HQ-items should work by the way - are you sure you bought the correct stuff?

It did work, After updating my gear and making one last item, I was able to turn it in. I was expecting some kind of progress indication as I obtained each item,and since nothing showed, I assumed that purchased items don't count (In WoW, you actually have to make the items required for profession quests.)

[StouterTaru]

In WoW, you actually have to make the items required for profession quests.

FFXIV started doing that with 4.0. When you hit the quests in the 60's the NPC will give you the materials, and you'll make an untradeable item to turn in.

[Vidu]

It did work, After updating my gear and making one last item, I was able to turn it in. I was expecting some kind of progress indication as I obtained each item,and since nothing showed, I assumed that purchased items don't count (In WoW, you actually have to make the items required for profession quests.)

For future references: Some quests work that way, specially those that require you to turn more than one item in. They will have a descriptive text, listing all the items you need, but they wont track which ones you got already.