That's... standard bad luck? You only crafted 19, on a craft that's below your level. Even with the update I imagine it's harder to level with lower-level items. For comparison, I was at Cooking 101, crafting Dragon Fruit Au Lait (Cooking 105). Using only Ionis (forgot to pick up food), I got about 0.9 skill in 30 synths, about a 30% rate. Trying to craft Dawn Mulsums (Cooking 97), I crafted about a dozen and didn't see a single skillup. Of course, these are small sample sizes; I might have gotten lucky, just as you might have gotten unlucky. But it's not enough evidence for us to complain that the devs are "trying to discourage us from playing."

So yeah, complaining about a small sample size isn't very productive.