This right here.With the introduction of the Ishgard restoration I feel like everyone and their mothers are omnicrafters now. Crafting (and to a smaller degree gathering) has always been an aspect of the game that was kinda hard getting into, because you were gated by the 100 levequest cap, leveling up was slow if you gathered all the mats yourself and very expensive if you instead bought them on the marketboard (impossible for new players who are never wealthy). When you’d finally reach level cap materia would become a problem because the endgame master recipes used to require pretty high stats paired with a few HQ mats to be HQ crafted reliably. With Ishgard getting your crafters to level cap is so easy and QUICK that every player can now craft everything for themselves and the market is flooded with items that don’t sell until their prices fall to rock bottom and the marginal gain you get from selling is virtually 0. This issue also comes with the fact that since 5.0 no recipe in the master books has been so difficult to require high stats (and thus expensive melds and/or HQ mats), they’re all pretty simple and in fact what happened with 5.2 is there for all to see: the market crashed in basically a single day because almost no one would buy gear off the MB when crafting it was quick and easy.
Right now the only stuff that sells are raid food and pots (for an incredibly low price, it’s almost not even worth gathering the mats to craft them) and a few evergreen glamour items (that I’m not gonna list here but you can easily guess which they are). Levekits are not a thing anymore (because of Ishgard).
The argument of expert recipes doesn’t seem to hold any logic as far as I’m concerned because those recipes are only used to craft items that you cannot sell on the marketboard thus they don’t interfere with the market dynamics in any way.
I’d like to see crafting and gathering being more difficult again (I know it’d be a pain for newer players; I know I’m writing this as an omnicrafter/gatherer). Gil has never been much useful in this game outside of glamour and if we keep going on like this I feel like it’ll become even more so.