What is exactly is the point of crafting?

[Despite]

Crafted gear should be a viable alternative to quests reward gear while leveling, this is difficult currently as you have to switch back and forth between gathering and crafting classes and it's expensive to buy mats for low level players.
At level 50 crafted gear should be equal to raid drops but have a different aesthetic. Maybe even have a couple pieces be best in slot. Remember the engineering goggles in WoW and how awesome and cool they were? Yeah, that.
Everyone looks the same in this game and that sucks.

[Castillan]

So most of the responses do seem to be backing up my original points.

Crafting is only useful to make food to raid with, and I agree with that. Which means that botany, fishing, and culinarian are currently the only useful/worthwhile DoL/DoH classes to pursue, which also gets back to the only useful thing to spend gil on, is food, although I reckon you'd be hard pressed to not be earning enough through dungeon grinding to not be able to afford food for raids anyway.

Oh, and Carpentry, if NO ONE else in your FC is a high level carpenter, for housing.

[OldGeezer]

So most of the responses do seem to be backing up my original points.

Crafting is only useful to make food to raid with, and I agree with that. Which means that botany, fishing, and culinarian are currently the only useful/worthwhile DoL/DoH classes to pursue, which also gets back to the only useful thing to spend gil on, is food, although I reckon you'd be hard pressed to not be earning enough through dungeon grinding to not be able to afford food for raids anyway.

Oh, and Carpentry, if NO ONE else in your FC is a high level carpenter, for housing.

You forgot equipping alt-classes. You don't get gear from FATE-grinding. I made a lot of money selling level 30 gear? Why, because BradyFox is a gear check.