I very much concur with what the OP had said. That's how I feel throughout Stormblood too.

That said, the game does have to accommodate casual crafters / learning crafters too.

The Ala Mhigan set was quite fun at the beginning, but then they nerfed it so much in 4.3 and made it seemingly "worthless". However, I don't see this as necessarily a bad thing.

Here's my opinion, I think SE can adopt either of these two strategies (or a mixture of them) to make crafting challenging while accommodating casual /learning crafters:

(1) Just like what happened with Ala Mhigan set from patch 4.1 to 4.3, start off the newest items at very high difficulty so the veteran crafters like myself can have some fun and make some cash. Then nerf it 2 patches later, so that casual crafters can do them too.

(2) Keep all functional items at macro-able (a.k.a. easy) difficulty so everyone can do it, but design really nice glamour crafting tools/gear (including tools that literally SHINES immediately when unsheathed) that are "real challenges" for veteran crafters. Perhaps if you fail to get these HQ, then the item doesn't shine. Liam Harper had raised this possible strategy earlier, and I think it's quite a nice idea. This way, casual crafters cannot complain saying "crafting is too difficult", because these are just glamour items. You don't "need" them to play the usual crafting game.

(1) would at least give veteran crafters an edge with gil-making before everyone can massively macro them and crash the market, whereas shiny tools in (2) is just long-overdue for crafters.