crafting is such a big brain thing that i still dont get most of the stuff lol
anyway
waste not ii and manipulation are almost the same thing, except that manipulation is regarded to be better coz you don’t waste any of the buff stacks when you want to use buffs (steps that dont reduce durability) or ToT (miqo loves to Hasty + ToT)
also in most of my crafting solvers’ cases they dont seem to use waste not anyway (miqo says it only increases HQ rate by 0.5%) so its a waste of extra time needed to solve the recipe