Genuinely, What am I missing?

[Remarus]

- snip -

While I appreciate the deeper analysis, our tools were not as robust back then and simply not as well programmed because the community was smaller and we simply hadn't optimized the fun out of everything yet. If the crafting suite had not been touched at all from then to now, we'd still have Teamcraft calculating the most optimal rotation within a day of a new craft recipe landing. That's just the nature of modern MMOs.