Gil is worthless.

[Mawlzy]

Economies are fun to game when the system doesn't have the power to hurt people.

True, but the FF14 economy has boundary conditions that prevent it from resembling a genuine market. For example, many crafted products cost a tiny fraction of the sum of the cost of the materials used to craft them. I suspect one reason is people craft to level, thus take a significant gil loss. There's no parallel in so-called real life.