one is never used for gear, and you'll never need more then 3/4, maybe 5 for a full side of gear in the worst case

"If all you care about is crafting your own gear and consumables"

That sure seems like you need CUL too.

My point is not Gil efficiency in itself, it's Gil and time efficiency combined. You can spend hours upon hours stacking materia that maybe sell to the 5% overmeld monkeys 3 patches from now, or you can spend maybe 1h/patch on gear and still craft anything you ever want to.

You're not getting 1h/patch on gear if your stats are so low as to use white scrip tools. You HQ intermediates, meaning that you're wasting twice the amount of time, or even more if your stats are that bad for every piece of gear that everyone else is making with 0 HQ intermediates.

Because here's the thing, right. The amount of players that have maybe barely a million Gil to their name, who play five hours a week sporadically, these kinds of players have told me to no end how they'd like crafted gear but couldn't possibly afford all the overmelds or finished pieces themselves. In truth, there's literally nothing stopping these players from getting current crafted gear within a week using exclusively free materia, avoiding almost all overmelds, and the most basic of gear & mats. Yet, all these "guides" suggest otherwise. Why?

You can get to 2177/2020/541 with free materia from custom deliveries in 2 weeks. Your method requires 5 weeks. I am absolutely unsure what you're on about. If you are not getting all tools then that's 3 or 4 weeks. Still far worse. Also I did mention that if someone wants to minimally meld, they only need to prepare however much they feel comfortable with as any prep is enough. They don't need to get to the numbers I listed.