This is still very much in progress but I've been crunching the numbers and the gathering results are appalling.
Suppose you have a lair full of dragons that only eat one of each food type. Most specific themed lair full of Fae, Wildclaws, Tundras, Ridgebacks, Dusthides, Cirrus, Coatl, all those highly picky eaters everyone loves.
Suppose you're like me and spend your gathering in balanced weekly cycles, with weekends reserved for scavenging.
Suppose all your dragons are well fed and you have your energy bonus turns. This means you get 15 turns on each food gathering option a week to fill up your food stocks on a normal week (up to 18 if your flight is 1st place in Dominance, but I'm not counting these)
Suppose you Vault and Lock all the items that are used on the various site activities (Swipp, Baldwin, Sophie, Den tasks) in case you'll need them in the future, or just because they have some demand in the Auction House. Either way you don't convert those.
From what I'm seeing so far, you absolutely can't have more than 20 dragons that eat each type of food in your lair. If you go over that, gathering simply will not be sustainable. The numbers in the table above actually average to 18 dragons (rounded down) fed per 15 turns per week.
Being absurdly generous and saying all of your dragons eat every type of food and you convert absolutely everything with wild abandon just to keep them all fed. It would still cap at about 100-ish active dragons in your lair before gathering becomes unsustainable and you'll need to resort to Coliseum farming.
And that doesn't take into consideration that Coliseum requires fed dragons and spends energy when you fail (say, while grinding for a boss familiar, two of which are Den Items). That doesn't take into consideration that I already have all gathering maxxed out to level 40, something that takes months to achieve. That doesn't take into consideration that rng can fuck you over and give you multiple turns of 1 item worth 2fp.
The gathering economy is in shambles
