Just like many players, I am already aware of how bonuses work with food and am playing an incredibly low Dex archer build (24 base + equipment and converters) to make good use of tuna kabobs accuracy but my argument was about the lack of balance in cooking features compared to the other disciples of hands and their uses. In the order of which players regard a class's importance, usefulness or value to the game, cooking could be considered to be at the very bottom right now. Trying to reference players to a spreadsheet online about foods that have marginal bonuses even at "Divine Status" will not encourage them enough to make them see cooking to be valuable in any sense. I don't have to inform players about why they should buy and use my Blacksmith made hammers to improve their gaming power.
Eating a specific food well does not justify players being forced to play with incredibly specific stat build when the game was designed to be very open about how a player chooses to assign their points. The lack of Dexterity definitely hurts my Goldsmith, Weaver and natural Melee Accuracy enough to be noticeable. The only reason I can do this is due to the nature of battle being more dependent on the rank comparisons with the target, then the actual stat differences. Making stat sacrifices is not something to be overlooked easily when trying to be the best player of a role or class. If that tuna food gives me % accuracy or control, I want to know the exact numbers to compare the results of actually lowering my overall accuracy full time in stats, only to boost it back up when eating food.
If I am in a situation against a high defense monster, I should be allowed to eat something with an attack boost, equally as well as an accuracy food if the need for it arises. Lowering my Strength to eat attack foods optimally just sounds counterproductive in the first place. Should I just even out all my stats around base 80 and adjust with converter traits to suit whatever food I am in need of at the moment? Your charts can't answer this because it doesn't know how good the bonuses are. Do you still feel the system needs no balancing when knowing this?
There is zero demand for River Sand or Sea Sand and their only value is the 25 Gil from a shop and it is a pure loss synthesis considering the same fish can be turned into a decent profit when made into shards and crystals in Alchemy. My point is mainly that a rank 50 cook is not valuable to have over a 50 Blacksmith or Weaver for the reasons I stated above. If you want to get into specifics, 1-50 Blacksmith can be done with just a lot of Iron Ores while 1-50 Weaver can be done purely with Cotton Bolls and shards. Cooking still needs to be skilled up on many different fishes.
Just looking at the forum popularity in the classes sections, Cooking and Alchemy are pretty bare but no one can argue Alchemy not being the best sub craft in the game. The crafting skills (Preserve, Hand of the Gods), materials (Glues, Oils) and shards provided, along with the crafting requirement levels from other classes using it as sub craft makes Alchemy indispensable compared to Cooking.