Kinda, but not the drops. It's just the consumption of them as synthesis items for your weapons. Like sometimes you have plenty of flame crystals but what you really need is another type of crystal for your weapon. That where the crystal shop comes in. They sell crystals (around 300 gilda each IIRC) for you. Since later levelling synth weapons becomes easier, so do the amount of points for you to synthesize items to.
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...then blame it to the cabbages