Indeed. Seens like common drops are like 100% when no rare drops drop. I also happened to end dropping the rings from phaia when helped a friend farming the axe there. Would be mucho more interesting if they dropped stuff that stack, like leathers, ingots, etc.

They could even be tricky and make 3~4 pieces of armor which materials come from NM only...like if we have 20 NMs then we could have 4 recipes using 5 materials that could be obtained from 5 different NMs.

About the materia system, its just a new feature...i wouldn't mind having the NM drops also crafted...actually, i wouldn't mind having every single piece of equipment, if not a damaged version (the ones that can be upgraded to vintage version), being crafted. Its part of the game having stuff crafted...not being able to craft an item in this game is like having monsters that we are not able to kill with fighting classes (like Odin was for a long time in FFXI, while roaming in the map).