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.