Demimateria? Desynthesis?? ARGHH!

[Vidu]

Been playing since January, have a bit over 21M. But, I'm cheap. I still port home to Limsa and take the airship if I need to get to another city, and use teleport tickets for anything over 250 gil.

I'm currently stuck on the Sample Chronometer GSM quest at level 68 because my crafting level is too low. I won't buy new gear though. I'll just wait til I can use the 70 set I already have, then finish the quest

Sometimes you have to spend money to make money.
Reading all your questions and complains about crafting over the past months almost makes me want to tell you to drop crafting alltogether because you obviously dont understand this very basic principle that is infact important when it comes to crafting.

Its not that I dont understand your position, I'm trying to do as much as possible myself instead of just buying everything from the marketboard, but I will do so on occassion if I consider spending gil being the actual cheaper option in the long run.

Looking at your example here:
The demimateria you need requires that you desynth glamour or crafter gear - DoW/DoM wont yield fieldcraft materia. In order to get those you'll either have to
(1) buy them from a vendor, potentially for more than 8k
or
(2) craft them, using materials and your time, that if added up at marketvalue and factoring in the RNG might end up costing you more than 8k aswell.

Not only is it probably more expensive to get this demimateria from deynth, even if they change it up with 5.1 so that you wont need to level it anymore - RNG is still gonna be involved, so you might end up having to purchase (direct waste of gil) or craft (indirect waste of gil by wasting materials and time) multiple items instead of just getting the demimateria you need.
In addition to that its also hindering your progress right now, correct? Potentially losing you money indirectly again because you're being stuck at this part.

Being cheap is okay - but you should try to be smart about it, too. Blindly refusing to buy things might cost you more in the end...

To give you an example here:
I'm making my money by crafting endgame-items - gear, food, potions, that stuff. My time equals money here, so I'll look at the marketboard to figure out wether its worth my time - that I could spend crafting - to go out and gather the materials myself. If I have an hour at my hand to spend with "making money" I'll consider how to spend that time best. If the materials are fairly cheap on the market, I'll make more money in that hour if I invest some of my gil instead of my time and just craft the full hour. If materials are extremly expensive, I'll go and grab them myself.

Serious advcie here: Stop being cheap by default. That will only cost you.

[aesteval]

My past experience in WoW has been that the raw materials almost always sold for more than the things made from them.

While that does happen over here at times and it's good to be aware of, it's not as consistent of an occurrence over here. WoW crafting requires massive quantities of mats to make many items, which helps keep the prices of the source mats high. Since the entire crafting system amounts to what FFXIV has in quick synthesis, the entire focus of the WoW crafting system is on acquiring mats in the first place. FFXIV uses fewer mats to craft and the focus of crafting is actually on the crafting process / minigame.

[Duskane]

if you have loads of Eureka lock boxes there's plenty of demimateria there

[Hasrat]

if you have loads of Eureka lock boxes there's plenty of demimateria there

Clear demimateria is only for selling. Crafting requires fieldcraft or battlecraft demimateria.