Item Level? I'm not clear

[Sylve]

RANT ON

I'm not clear why we can't have a simple rule.

"Larger Item Level Means Better Gear."

Why is this not the case?
Why is it not the case that the "Recommended Gear" button on the Character panel should just be able to choose the gear with the higher item level.

So, apparently, now White gear can have a higher item level, but lower stats and therefore not be as useful as "yellow" [is that what it is? Higher Quality? From quests?] gear. So item level 285 White gear from a vendor is CRAP compared to IL 279 gear from quests that has a yellow shading across the top. I don't mind that the 279 gear is better, only that it has a lower Item Level. Shouldn't it be IL 290? Why is it not IL 290?

Let's just have a future patch where we fix this so that higher item level means "Better" and the "Recommended" button agrees. How about we do that?

1. Is there some other religion around "Item Level" that I am not aware of that prevents this?
   
2. Is there some dependency around Item Level that would prevent this change from occurring?

RANT OFF

Hrmm. I'll try to answer what I think your issue is stemming from.
Item Level determines the stat cap. The cap itself is an individual figure, which is then divided amongst the stats that are present. The total combined present stats are not using 100% of the stat cap though. It leaves room for customization via Materia Melds.

Vendor Gear is Normal Quality. Crafters can make High Quality versions. NQ vs HQ is essentially how much of the stat cap is available.
Now, to use some example numbers to illustrate what you see happening, Lets assume an i285 item has a stat cap of 500, and the i279 has 450.
In this situation, the NQ i285 is only utilizing 70% of its stat cap, leaving it with 350 usable stats.
But since the i279 is HQ, it is utilizing 90% of its Stat cap, leaving it with 405 usable stats.

The result is that the HQ i279 has more available stats to give you than the NQ i285, which is why the Recommended button equips the i279 over the i285.
Another way to describe it, I guess, is that the NQ is a stat penalty, while HQ is the removal of that penalty. The HQ stats is what the piece SHOULD have for its Item Level, but the NQ applies a 30% penalty because the crafter (vendor in this case) wasn't skilled enough to make a quality piece.
An IRL example would be Chinese imitations/knockoffs of a product. It looks the same, it sorta works the same, But its build quality is junk so its inferior to the product it was imitating.

Does that make sense?