So, trying to take this thread semi-seriously...

Honestly, I think it’s worth having real crafting mentors, since the crafting/gathering system can be a bit overwhelming for people... but crafting mentors, ideally, should help with crafting. When wearing the crafting mentor icon, I helped gear up sprouts (crafting stuff for undergeared people in ARR, where getting accessories as you level is a complete pain), I helped some folks leveling crafters learn how to figure out their own ideal rotations (because just copying a macro isn’t the best way to learn how the system works, and means you won’t be able to come up with the right macro if your stats differ from the ‘ideal’), helped folks learn efficient ways to gather materials for crafting projects, etc. That sort of stuff? Absolutely worth having crafting mentors for.

But honestly, I think the mentor system as a whole is broken; the metrics used to earn mentor status aren’t really relevant to being a good mentor, in either capacity. Just earning 1500 commendations is relatively easy, just time-consuming, and you could do that entirely as a healer, or a tank, and have no idea how to play any other job besides your own. And earning the crafting mentor crown is similarly easy.

I wish that the commendation system let you comm people after they left, for about five minutes after the end of the dungeon or something. And let you pick a reason (“Patient teacher”, “Excellent Tank/Healer/DPS”, “Funny”, whatever) from about four or five options. Then people would need commendations that were actually relevant to mentoring folks. And when you had enough commendations, you could take a test—like a solo raid boss fight tailored to your role—and upon completing that, then you’d be certified as a battle mentor for that job.

And I wish the crafting system had something akin to expert crafting, a randomized crafting thing where you needed to actually know how the crafting system worked in order to complete the crafting task. And a similar challenging gathering task. Once you had done those, you could be certified as a crafting mentor.

(But I admit adding the infrastructure for such a thing—much less keeping the solo trials for each job balanced as jobs were tweaked—would probably be a fair amount of work, and something like that is almost certainly not going to happen.)