I don't see a problem with shards and cristal, and I often need to buy some. I guess it depend how much you craft. Or the recipe just doesn't take enough of those. If you find those useless, we could tell the same about the materia, since melding is not really needed anymore.

Removing stuff from crafting is a bad idea. They should come back to what crafting was in ARR and HW, in SB crafting became way too easy and boring. There is no need to pentameld anymore. You can HQ anything with a simple macro (about 26-28 actions, so 2 macros) since there is no RNG anymore in the craft. They wanted to simplify the crafting so everyone could craft 4 stars items, but by doing so, they made the crafting boring af and it's kinda useless to want to sell 4 stars items now, you make way more money by just selling the raw mats now, because anyone can make it and undercut you... Even collecting the mats is easy now, I miss the time in early 3.x where you had to uses bluescrip to get a special item that will give random chance to spawn a special node, to get the items needed for crafting the end game gear. It was a true challenge back then. Not something easy...