Since this can never be overstated enough: If you ever need any, any, grade of material, you should always go and get the highest grade in that category if possible (either from HGE's, Jameson Crash site, crystalline shards, etc) and trade those down. Never waste time trading anything up! You would be wasting hundreds if not thousands of materials you may have manually picked up to get stuff that way.
Having just recently grinded my way through getting all of my material bins 100% filled, I can tell you straight up, even when you cheese it, even when you deliberately grind the most efficient method, it takes tens of hours to get some of these mats even doing it this way. Do not make life more difficult for yourself by wasting time going after lower grade mats directly, or trading lower stuff up into higher stuff. Oh and don't be afraid to cross-trade either. Yes the returns are worse, but sometimes even that is still better than trying to find the other mats directly.
