I think making traces, fruits and essences into singular item each category is generally a good Alchemey move. I appreciate it may be a different opinion for those concerned with  the market or gathering issues of said items, but really, there are still many other alchemy ingredients that can be gathered, farm fenced, node produced such as saps, powders, mushrooms etc, more than enough still to keep me busy and happy so overall im positive about the change.

The game had a significant bloat on items across the board. These changes are good. Sorry if your feeling of being "special" beucase you were used to it is hurt. But objectively this is a good and needed change. It is not 2014 anymore.

@ alchemy, yeah, if alchemy was deeper, that would be cool, but it's still heavily reliant on traces and fruits. I don't think it's going to fix the bottle neck that well. It has been a hard fail because it has been bottle necked. Different mats are fine with me. Having to gather mats is fine, too, but if I can't go out and get like 3000 or 5000 traces or fruits, it's not worth it. I can get enough meat to do that sort of cooking. I can get enough blood to fulfill the blood req, so why can't I fill the trace / fruit req? I want alchemy to not be reliant on rare items. By rare I mean not really obtainable by normal means. People talk about farming, but even with a full farm set up, you aren't getting that kind of fruits afaik.

That was the real problem. And now, every time you gather traces, it's gonna be the same idea. The one thing that is gonna change is that there will be traces that are gathered by accident, like mob farm traces that people will dump. Fruits? I dunno. Probably will still be a huge issue.

It could be some deserted island that you have to go to to get the mats, but you need to be able to get them en masse. That is the flaw of alchemy. Even milk seems to be something you can get in higher numbers and much faster. Just bad balance, but sure I'd like there to be deeper alchemy, too. Mainly there always needed to be a way to get ingredients.

Now this, and I dunno I am not playing atm anyway.

Bit of a rubbish thing you say there. By the way; BDO launched in 2016, not 2014. A year has nothing to do with how a game works. It's now 2024. So? Then you can change the whole damn game, because it is not of this time. 
Games become popular because of certain aspects they have. The lifeskilling in BDO was with the diverse things you could gather and produce something you don't see elsewhere. Now with this simplification it becomes less unique. 

A part of me felt the change was odd at first, and even missed the old system for a moment. But it's ultimately proven a positive change so far.

The main issue is whether or not they adjusted all the recipes that needed adjusting, along with any quests that may have required the old fruits/traces (Example : Alustin's New Experiment, which required Traces of Despair at least when last accepted.)

Any variety that was lost was offset by the freeing of storage/warehouse space, and the overcomplicated system clearly wasn't using that variety at all if they were able to condense it like this.

I really hoped they would come to their senses and not go through with this change, but shitting on lifeskillers for the sake of people who don't lifeskill seems to be the direction PA is going with the game.

So many things I used to gather before the awful changes, so many dissapointments.

lifeskilling needed more complexity  not lesss.  They should have never tried to simplify it..  Now there is no market diversity, everyone is producing and trying to sell the same stuff.  You generate all the materials needed without playing the game.  It was an objectively horrible change and gathering and alchemy is less even less profitable as a result

they were never able to make a way to reliably get fruit or traces. Total traces seemed ok, but total fruit is still low, I'd say.

And yeah agreed with more complexity. Gathering money is OK still. I just sell fox blood. :o If I'm gonna do alchemy, I'll buy the mats. I do it mostly for byproducts and cp.

Elixir market crashed tho lol.

All I ever wanted, as I said, was a place to go and gather the fruits I needed or the traces. I should be able to go in with one energy pool, no matter how long it takes, and fill up with thousands of them so I can do some serious alchemy. The fact that was never achievable was bad biz. There is no reason alchemy was permanently bottlenecked.

The ironic best way to get trace of savegry was just farming blood wolves haha.

This is exactly what they are doing and is the correct move. Did you ever consider they dont lifeskill because it's a trash system? This game has INSANE amounts of item bloat in every system across the board, by far worse than any other game in existence. This was done solely to sell inventory space, but PA is realizing this is killing their ability to keep new players around. Older players are slowly bleeding out naturally and nobody is replacing them. The absurd amount of items that are not necessary but only exist to clutter your inventory is very very unpopular with 95%+ of the general playerbase. The game shot up in player numbers greatly last yearduring horse event and then slowly shot right back down once new players got completely overwhelmed, there were posts here and on reddit and in game constantly about the absolute flood of random useless items this game has. Hopefully they continue in this direction and never look back.