The good news is, if you honestly believe you have to camp vendors just to keep up to same level enemies (tip: you don't outside of Tactician at all), you can play four Intelligence based casters. They don't really scale with gear nearly as much as the physical builds and do just fine.
So the 'good news' is that you have to play a specific type of party makeup to even attempt to get away from the item scaling problem? Go white knight for terrible systems somewhere else, nobody's buying your bullshit here.
