It's much better than WoW crafting. WoW crafting could easily be maxed out in 30 minutes, provided you had the mats. And those "better" systems are usually overly complex and painful. FF14 strikes a good balance between the 2.
There is some talk that the devs are going to make Alex Pt. 2 have more physical dmg. I think they realize that having (mostly) magical dmg kind of screwed over PLD hard.
