The game doesn't really know where it wants to be at all right now. They got over-bloated grinding happening everywhere with crafting and also have savage content which requires all that extra work, while simplifying jobs so that more people are going to go into the supposedly harder content. It's like having to pay to get punched in the face for hours. There is no end game or plan for crafting other than to be a source of gear for savage at this point, since housing gear can be gained indirectly through other means like the online store, various side content like beast tribes, and just general provisioners. That and the crafters have to craft better crafting gear to craft better raiding gear, which requires farming scrips for even and odd grade materia because the spirit bond rate is awful, and then they often say "oh this is just fine. We have macros!"

Buddy, pal, you are MAKING a MACRO to avoid the minigame that the developers intentionally put IN THE GAME because it is supposed to make it "interesting and fun". If I'm making a macro that is going to avoid doing the task that makes it interesting and fun, there is something wrong here.

Second, the oversimplification of the jobs is largely to facilitate moving into harder content. So now there is even more pressure for people to go grind the craft system, which by the way has a lot of grinding involved and is surprisingly time consuming due to the gathering half requirements, to make gear, food, and other items. Additionally, crafting is the only way to gain access to pentamelding, which is needed on the gear. So because of this, a raider has to either both pay for gear and pay for pentameld, or they level a craft job to penta meld and then buy gear.

By the way, that raider also has to basically do roulettes for money or run map runs on off days because he has no source of income from their main pursuit. They are literally gobbling up goods being crafted and consuming a lot of gil in repairs. This is why the Gil problem is happening because SE has to give a ton of easy ways to gain gil that exceeds the costs of dying hundreds of times and upgrading gear every season. If someone stops playing right after beating a tier, they aren't losing money but they aren't gaining money either if they intend to play in the next. This is probably the main reason outside of burnout that people do not do every tier in an expansion. FYI, I did every tier in the expansion this time around just to get a feel for this insanity.