An educated rant: Why pentamelding is %@$&*!-backwards

[Erik501]

Imagine you have your driver's license and you want to drive a car, but before you could even step into a car you had to learn how to learn how to play the violin.

Bad example. You don't play the violin to improve the performance of your car, do you? However you pentameld your gear to improve its performance so, following with your example of the car, if you want to improve its performance you need to buy the required parts (materia) and pay someone (the crafter) to do it or learn to craft the parts, gather the required materials to craft them and implement the performance improvement yourself (sidequests). Makes a lot of sense to me.