I hate these quests so much. It feels like stuff sells for so much less in this game, even gear and items you've made, and that gear is so much more useful than before because of gems, the forge, and the collector synthesizer thingamabob. Like, aside from those quests, you have less reason to sell things than basically any other Atelier game in recent memory.
Let's talk traits. I've finally started to get into attaching decent traits to my gear, but I feel like I've either not seen enough traits or that they've simplified the system somewhat. In previous games, you could combine traits to make stronger ones, which ended up being a really fun puzzle in its own right. You could combine different strengths of Attack/Defense/Speed UP traits to create even stronger ones, and then combine one from each stat type to make all-stats traits.
In Ryza, it seems like that's not really a thing anymore; instead you're just stacking multiples of the same trait(s) to increase their effects. The upside is that you can get stronger traits earlier than in previous games (create stacks of ATK/SPD, ATK/DEF and DEF/SPD and suddenly you can get 50+ to each stat!), and you don't have to worry about whether a trait is too expensive to attach because traits just take up a slot now, there isn't a cost associated with them. But I do miss the more puzzle-y aspect to combining traits.
Incidentally, this also creates an incentive to a) build items by chaining multiple recipes so you can add more ingredients and stack more traits together; b) rebuild items to add more ingredients and stack more traits; and c) put good traits on recipes that produce multiple of a single item, because then you can just spam them in another recipe and stack those traits.