Essentially, what you're getting down to, is you don't want craftng to be a grind at all. You want it to be an easy accompanyment to your DoW/DoM jobs, where you can focus on DoW/DoM and create your own gear for those jobs with only a token side effort into crafting. That is a fair opinion to have, even if I don't personally agree with it.
Personally, I feel the opposite, I don't feel that crafting is treated seriously enough. Just as combat jobs have high-difficulty activities and long grinds, so, too, should crafting. Crafting SHOULD array itself into tiers, with the casual crafters earning lesser rewards and the devoted crafters getting access to the best stuff. Just as combat classes have folks who raid and those who don't, crafters should have those who 4-star and those who don't.
People should be forced to make the hard decisions on where they want to focus their efforts in this game. Do they want to be an endgame raider? An endgame crafter? Something else? A career soldier probably isn't also a gourmet chef and a master jeweler. They chose to be a soldier, and while they may cook as a hobby and dabble in trinkets, those aren't what they do for a living. Acknowledging that, yes, there's always someone with more free time than you have who really CAN become an expert at everything, I don't feel like that should be an option for normal folks.
