In hindsight there's so many things they could've done with stones.
Trade 5 or even 10 of them to upgrade a +1>+2 or +2>+3 Empy as an alternate route to Galli one.
Trade a specific number of them and an earring to reroll its augments.
Trade one of them and 10 earrings of any type but same quality to pick an earring of your choice of the same quality.
Trade one of them and 10 earrings of the same type to upgrade that earring to a higher level of quality (NQ>+1 and +1>+2).
Just throwing out very simple ideas that could need some balancing in its variables/numbers, but would still offer solid control to players, but moderate enough that it doesn't entirely kill the grind, it actually offers a much better carrot on a stick.
But noooo, they had to make them sellable for what surely is gonna be absymal numbers.
And despite that,
any number is bad really. We don't need any more Gil generating things in this game that already suffers from inflation so bad mostly because of that.
They seemed to have understood that simple concept when they made Sparks conversion weekly, but think again.
I dunno, it's all moot talk given what happened, but it seems to me this would've been a perfectly achievable goal even with their skeleton crew, so the fact that they didn't even bother is terribly irksome to me.