The fundamental flaw in gathering this game

[Zetonegi]

I spy with my little eye someone who isn't over level 30 in a gathering class!

No seriously, you're forgetting that post 30 xp to level starts to increase dramatically while xp gained for a successful gathering attempt remains fairly stagnant while XP per craft increases at a decent rate.
1000 Flax -> 500 Linen Thread -> 200 Linen cloth(+100 thread) -> 100 Linen Chausses(conveniently a triple leve item) -> leve turn ins is about 15 levels of crafting. Not even going hard core on HQing the pants either. Could probably get another level or two if you really pushed it on the pants. That's 3.5 levels of botany for 15 levels of weaver. THREE AND A HALF levels. Oh that's WITH an XP scroll for all of it. And while Weaver is sort of a corner case, having more efficient raw material usage than most other crafts, the disparity gets much worse as you level. You'll easily gather all the raw materials you need to move up a crafting tier in 2 levels of gathering for the other classes. And that's just turning the raw materials into processed materials. Logs to lumber, ores to ingots. You get easily 3x as much XP crafting as you do gathering the materials to craft and that's just with a basic 15line crafting macro, no optimizations.

[Lyein]

I spy with my little eye someone who isn't over level 30 in a gathering class!

I laughed reading the original post, as I'm sure Zetonegi did. You need piles and piles more than you'll ever use to craft of the highest level things. Everyone raising their DoL's have to dump those materials on the market as well; we just don't have the retainer space for 1000 mahogany logs or 4000 shards to convert it all to more compact lumber. This leads to our most coveted, high-level materials being dirt-cheap while lower level things sell high. The only reason the first-gen crafts (Ingots, lumber etc) sell high is from shard costs added into the price.

Perhaps SE just didn't expect so many people to grind through the DoL's? It seems like a reasonable assumption that many people could level through the relatively easy DoH's and just not spend the time on DoL; but obviously there are plenty doing it anyway.