As the years have gone on, various accomodations have been made such that someone who comes to the game late in its life is not as much of a disadvantage (e.g. EXP is faster, certain quests and missions are easier, etc). However, craft skills have had no such improvements (other than the introduction of synergy which is nice n' easy).

Though there are a few other issues, my main issue is guild points. It's completely random (well, there IS a pattern, but it's complex and unless you're using a tool or a site like ffxiah.com, you'll never know the pattern) how many guild points you can get in a day, and also by extension completely random if you'll be able to actually make/find the item and get guild points at all. Then on top of that, there are great disparities in the amount of guild points some crafts can get vs others.

1) The difficulty of getting and the amount of guild points recieved should be normalized- e.g. some of the easiest/lowest return and hardest/highest return items should be changed, to make it less pseudo-random.
2) HQ items should allow for a higher maximum point total, not just reach the maximum faster.
3)Fix disparities in points possible in different crafts. For some crafts like smithing and goldsmithing, on some days you can get over 7000 guild points with a single item if you're able to get it. For Cooking and Alchemy, even with the most annoying recipes you can rarely get more than 2500-3000. This seems to be in part because the guild point values are based on the NPC sell values of the items. This needs to be abolished and points should be based only on difficulty instead. For these two crafts in particular, getting the several hundred thousand guild points you need takes FOREVER. No new player is going to want to take up a craft when they have minimal chance to be as good at it as anyone who's been in the game for years at this point.