I would. I doubt the savage or ultimate scene would die down that much if they removed the better gear from it.
The trap parties on the other hand. I'mma miss those.
Because Savage and Ultimate are in many respects their own reward, so removing the gear from them doesn't actually do much. That gear is primarily there to help out lower end raids that will need the gear advantage to clear what world class statics did the first week, so removing it is anti-casual more than anything else, and would actually increase stratification.
Except you have tome gear. Raid gear itself is just as often avoided due to sub-stat optimization, but vendor gear is more than sufficient (and usually what they test in) to get the job done. Even with that consideration, the gear is desirable because, again, Glamour. You can't dye normal raid gear.
that's why I'm totally fine with glamour being gatekeepered by this theoretical hardmode crafting gear stat boost. The realm of exclusive glamour to the hardcore dedicated crafter, sure. All for it.
Gear inflation is no bueno and will only leave you wanting more difficulty as you get the powerful stats. The "difficult" part of crafting is playing the market and how well you market yourself, in my opinion, and even that difficulty is based on time and effort.
Ishgarde will hopefully award cosmetic rewards (scrip gear or an enhanced variant being craftable, please) earned through challenges and not just the amount of collectibles you turn in.
Tomestone gear isn't immediately upgradeable to the same ilvl as Savage, so no. Casuals can catch up with Savage raiders... eventually... after they've had time to enjoy a mechanical advantage. And even then, as I've explained several times now, there are differences between raiding and crafting such that attempting to use one as an analogy for the rewards structure of the other is inappropriate. Crafting is in much greater need of exclusivity because of the way it's structured and what role it serves within the game. If you don't want to invest as much effort into crafting, you need to not be able to get as much out of it, or the whole thing will become worthless.
With this in mind, would you be in favor of removing omnicrafting? This much greater need of exclusivity cuts both ways, not just between those who do and do not want to craft, but also in the matter that there's very little required interdependence of people within crafting and gathering itself.
Removing omnicrafting is just a more extreme version of early HW specialists. What happened is that people just made multiple characters and bypassed that, and those who couldn't for whatever reason lost out.
People did not take well to the forced interdependence.
A ridiculous suggestion. No, I would not be OK with another path to gutting the part of the game I enjoy.
A lack of interdependence isn't an issue. If you insist on doing everything yourself, you're going to stay poor. That's only a good strategy for when you're first starting out and lack the capital to just buy what you need. Players who have that capital and understand how the economy works will regularly buy things like raw or intermediate materials rather than waste time crafting or gathering them themselves.
Being poor is less about how much gil you have and more about how easily you can spend and replace millions of gil. You barely need anything to get started though. I got my start making Sanguine Scepters with barely 200k to my name, which were the crafted base for the BLM relic weapon. That was something I could do in my crappy hodgepodge of leveling gear with no clue how or where to get better gear. I didn't have a blacksmith or an armorsmith leveled either, so I had to buy darksteel nuggets from the MB. As you get more money, it gets easier to make even more money, but everyone can spend within their means to increase efficiency and profit.