Personally, I'd be overjoyed if they made the crafting system similar to what they had in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. The game kind of tanked overall, but the crafting system was actually pretty engaging and, for the most part, made you feel like you were actually crafting a certain item. Not to mention it was far less random and tedious.

They also had strings of quests that you could do in order to learn specific recipes. Such as a going to different towns to learn to make different parts of a ship, so that you could eventually build your own. They also tied in the other crafting classes as well, seeing as you needed to be a carpenter in order to build the majority of the ship, but you needed metal parts from blacksmiths, or needed a weaver to make the sails.

In general, I think they either just need to simplify crafting a lot more, or go all out with it and make it far more engaging. As it is right now, it's just slow and monotonous just for the sake of being slow and monotonous.