Originally Posted by
Viviza
You'll never see a serious effort made for crafting to be end-game relevant. The focus is largely on leveling gear, novelties, and side content like airships.
If this makes you unhappy, you should drop crafting. I'm not saying this to be dismissive, I'm saying this because crafting must be this way. Making crafting competitive with drops will ultimately reward people who bot or RMT more than actual players. Many top raiders, crafters, and gatherers abuse these systems because they can use them to get ahead. Botting and cheating are not well controlled, but only have a mild impact because the economy isn't tightly bound to the core mechanics of the game. Also the gating system frustrates a lot of people, but it does keep people without much playtime on more equal footing.
I'll agree that the sheer effort involved is not in proper proportion to the rewards. The system is very convoluted, and only really serves to make crafters craft things which make them better at crafting. That's a lot of running in circles.