My shameful confession, is I've only started melding materia to my gear at level 80, having been playing since 2011 in 1.0 I completely ignored it for all those years til now (I did help I that I don't do endgame, but still). Before then, whenever I ended up with materia or had a piece of gear fully Spiritbond I just sold the materia on the MB and didn't use it myself. That's a different story now...