puglist/rogue/ninja jobs to help gear in present and future?

[Anova]

You will want all your crafters to be at least level 15 before you attempt to HQ any crafts. Otherwise, you will not have a reliable chance of getting a HQ item.

If you want cosmetic items at endgame, you will have to max all of your crafting classes. The synergy and difficulty of crafts is too much to ignore the advantages of cross-classing crafter abilities. Otherwise, you will risk 2 weeks worth of rare materials on a possible failure.

The most powerful gear is obtained through dungeon tokens or dungeon drops. Crafted gear is usually more cosmetic or for leveling purposes. This may change in the future, but we've seen no indication the dev team is going that way yet.

If you don't really care about the extra stats and just want a way to get cheap equipment until you can get to endgame gear, leveling your crafters to 60 is not necessary. Your story and side quests will provide you with the most recent armor and weapons for your level. The only exception to this is accessories. For that, I would recommend leveling goldsmith. You replace your gear with a new weapon and armor set about every 5 levels. After level 50, it is a complete set change every 2 levels. Keep your crafters/gatherers within 5 to 2 levels of whatever combat class you're crafting for.

So a breakdown if you absolutely want to level crafter/gatherers:
For All classes - Goldsmith to make Accessories. Accessories are not very common in the pre-50 story quest line.

For Lancer - Carpenter for weapons, Armorer for Armor and metal components, and Miner for materials. Leatherworker and Weaver are used to support Armorer. Botanist supports Carpenter, although lumber is fairly cheap and you don't need that much.

For Rogue/Ninja - Blacksmith for weapons, Leatherworker for Armor. Miner for materials to blacksmith and leatherworker. Weaver to support Leatherworker.

For Pugilist - Goldsmith for weapons, Leatherworker for Armor. Weaver supports Leatherworker.

If you level carpenter, armorer, leatherworker, goldsmith, and miner, you should cover most of your bases. Again, level 15 in the other classes is just to improve the quality of your gear (if you care about that), it is literally a 2% increase in your power.

It doesn't really mean too much while leveling unless your group is massively undergeared or you're the first in a dungeon and nobody knows the mechanics. That situation will not happen again until the next expansion.

BTW, half the crafters got involved because of cosmetic gear and glamours. The other half because they like supporting other players. There are crafter-only quests, such as building an airship. Crafter/Gatherers are also the best way to make money at endgame, which is another big incentive for a lot of players.