Quote Originally Posted by Nyalia View Post
On a related note, wasn't the point of Specialization that you could do endgame crafting for one class without leveling/melding every class?
It's pretty ironic, but yes. The goal of the developers has always been about making crafting more accessible for new players and this includes improving their chances of selling items on the market. On paper, requiring high level components from other DOH/DOL promotes cooperation, but it isn't working out in practice.

I believe that the changes in 2.4 were meant to achieve the same thing. Only at that time, the "solution" to the accessibility issue was to make omni-crafting easier, so they introduced shared BIS gear that had low meld caps and extra meld slots. That didn't work so we're seeing these changes now.