It used to be fashionable to do long "gathering routes" for special resources like platinum, gold, silver, rare mushrooms, flowers, crystals, etc that were a little more rare for certain recipes and goods. Now its essentially pointless to do anything other than a few popular mining, herb, mushroom, etc rotations to acquire these items efficiently. I suggest signifigantly buffing directly gathering these spawn nodes in 2 ways:

1.) Signifigantly increase the amount of resource that drops when gathering special spawn nodes directly (maybe x5+ or so)

2.) Signifigantly increase the rate at which rare items drop when gathering special spawn nodes directly (hards, sharps, dust, caphras, etc)

TLDR: Bring back the benefit of directly going around the world, planning out gathering routes for special resources to diversify gathering