Thing that irks me is that crafted combat gear is subpar at best, but for crafters (and previously gatherers) it's best in slot. On top of this crafting end-game has always required tons of expensive overmelding just to do the new recipes when they come out.
And yea, the sad thing is many other MMOs have managed to have affordable, relevant crafted gear in their games. Instead of reinventing the wheel they could maybe look at other titles in the genre to implement more than two itemization paths and slot machine mechanics.
