Well, this is exactly my point. Look, i have all my crafts at 60. Smithing is 93. Are there other ways to make gil? Of course. I'd -just-hit T3 for mythril picks so I threw the NPC train into the rotation because it's a not-through-AH way of making money. If that is the issue here, then change NPC prices or hit the botters. If there are people thinking it's not fair for a craft to have an NPC thing to sell, let's argue about how many people level fishing to do exactly that -- catching fish to print gil from an NPC.

What i'm mainly taking issue with here is hitting desynth as a whole. I'd buy quadav backplates from my LS. Newer players making decent starting gil from an LSmate. My stacks of iron i get as a result would largely be sold to other crafters. I get to be social and support people, and fund my own crafting. That was what I enjoyed, and I'd joke with my LS about how that kept the wheels of industry spinning. With how the numbers are looking, its ultimately not worth it to do it that way.

This, exactly. I'm only at 84+5(w/advanced) smithing but I've definitely seen the decline in the backplates desynth. I haven't been on long enough to do a large batch, but out of 3-4 stacks the last time, I probably lost 75% of my backplates. There are more and more crafters and once undercutting comes into play, tossing money or time farming these isn't worth it if all that happens is breaks. Like Demon said, there's other ways of making money with smithing, obviously, but desynths are a great way to get other materials to save time and money on other synths. I haven't tested my subs with desynths, but I can only assume they're the same thing from this thread.

I don't think gavial fish is a desynth. Not all lighting crystals are, rainbow thread out of two spider webs for instance is not a desynth. Similiarly not all desynths are lightning crystal, wind crystal to quadav black plate to darksteel sheet for instance is a desynth even though wind crystal.

I definitely don't remember round tripping mythril earrings into a profitable npc vendor being a thing on retail. If the mythril pick vendor price is correct and the mythril earring price is also correct, that's pretty strong evidence to me that the desynth mechanics were off in some way. The fix looks ballparkish correct to those BG results maybe sort of kind of? Retail also had mogenhancment desynthesis which that person may have had, and who knows maybe some day we might get.

I have npc’d wool thread in the past, but for the most part, my desynth activity is just time savings in obtaining cloth or thread without starting from scratch or quick flipping some desynth on to the AH when life is kicking my ass and I wanna keep the coffers filling. Makes it less worthwhile to jump on for those quickies for sure. None of the synths that I used to do are profitable anymore and the time savings is gone. Amusing use of limited time considering all the other things that could be fixed.

People just get on a pirate ship w/Ebisu. There's an NPC on the ship and if you get pirates you never get kicked off.
I don't know the average per hour from this but it has to be more than 50k. I've heard over 100k but I have no supporting evidence.