Necronopticous:

I agree that gathering specific loot to satisfy the recipe requirements for Greatswords like the Tournesol is comparable in terms of time consumption to looking for the Zodiac Spear. But you can gather the required loot while questing toward hunt marks, or collecting the hidden espers, at least for the Tournesol. So even though it takes long, it isn't too bad because you can gather loot for specifically the tournesol (probably other weapons too) on sidequests.

Anyways, I think your point is that if your objective is to gather everything (best armor, bow, pole, etc) in FFXII, the task is too mind-numbingly repetitive to warrant the effort. And, I agree. You have to look up which monsters drop what loot, where these monsters are located, sometimes these monsters are rare and don't spawn unless you run back and forth 10+ times, etc. They definitely could have added more variation to the methods used to earn certain bazaar items. I preferred gathering all the best weapons in FFX. At least there, each one (or so I recall) was tied to some fairly amusing sidequest, e.g. chocobo racing, or blitzball (which I actually liked)...

That said, I'm still going to look for this damn spear, and have one quick question:

Did you use the reload method, or did you run back and forth between 3 screens?