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There's a huge difference between a text MUD and gathering in most MMOs.  In those games, travel time is actually a thing.  If you want to go gather, you need to run around- find new nodes / spawnpoints of things, keep running, stay actively chasing them.  The respawn time also tends to be considerably faster than here.  You can spend an entire play session farming one thing until you're bursting.  There's nothing like that on Lusternia, even rockeaters will can all be wiped out by one person long before they start to respawn.

On a MUD, if you put in enough things with a low enough spawn time for someone to be constantly grinding, you end up with a flood of those comms (the closest we have is rockeaters).  Travel time here between nodes/spawnpoints is essentially nil, with celerity- you can farm the whole UV in a shockingly short period of time (four areas that combine into a huge part of the game!).  If you make all comms as continuously grindable as an MMO's nodes, we're going to burst with stockpiles since we can hit so many more nodes in such a shorter period of time.  After all, manse mines could only generate 10 comms each per day, and how much did people get out of those?  We've already seen what happens when it's deemed that there are "too many comms" in the game.

Another issue is that MMOs tend to have more players than these games.  There's a much larger quantity of people who are going to go farming, ensuring that there's always stuff available.  I think trying to pin production on Lusternia's playerbase is problematic; if you take steps to ensure that people aren't generating floods of comms, you then end up with the potential for not being able to generate enough to have available and shortfalls (which means that a lot of coding work was put in and it didn't even solve the issue we're discussing!).

Further, most MMOs have items drop.  You don't even need the commodities for most things; your basic stuff you get just by playing the game.  Commodities might be used for slight stat improvements or for specific quests, but the game isn't built around having them available as a requirement to simply play.

I want commodities to stop being treated as something that needs to be rare/limited because of how critical they are to simple gameplay tasks (unlike the other games you reference).  If it's possible to do active generation in a manner that isn't going to get us right back in this situation that we're in right now, and also ensures that they are available, then great.  Given coding resources, I'm pretty sure that's simply not going to happen any time soon.  How many things are in the queue already?  This shortage drive has been causing issues for quite a while now and it's only getting worse.  And we've been talking about economy issues for far longer than that.  I don't think it can just sit on the backburner, so I'd like to see something done sooner that is actually achievable.

Something needs to be done, though.

Edit: I realized that I forgot instruments in the last paragraph, despite them being an important thing too!  Wood would be needed for those.  Wood's kind of an awkward thing at the moment because you can generate a ton of it, but only a small number of people can ever farm it (whoever chops the trees first once they finally grow up).  So it's long periods of nothing followed by a burst.  We'd have to discuss something in that regard; just making Glom/Seren's trees grow faster would probably flood us with a ton of wood (and a lot of raiders looking for wood).  Maybe just make trees outside Glom/Seren automatically grow as saplings on day change, can never grow more than a sapling, but can be chopped for 1 wood?  In-org saplings are not choppable for 1 wood, they need to grow up big and strong first.