All crafted equipment is good.
All crafted equipment can be easily beaten by dungeon drops or items you buy with tomes.
Best case comparison is some of the top (2-star) crafted equipment can match some of the top dropped items (for example, 5 melded rings).

From this, it looks like crafted gear is good. But once you calculate the cost of materials (and therefore time needed to acquire the material or to acquire the gil needed to buy the materials), it looks less good.

The end result is, given time (T), user can either spend xT to farm equipment (drops, tomes), or yT to farm materials (to buy or make crafted equipment). Typically, y > x, thefore it is more efficient to not deal with crafted equipment and simply get Mythos related equipment.

In fact, given how easy it is to get mythos gear, I do not even bother with darklight gear and save those stones to buy other stuff.

I think it may be fair to say that the new 'intention' from SE is:
Equipment will be gathered form dungeons (directly or via tomes to buy it).
Crafting will be used for Vanity equipment.
Crafting will be used for PvP equipment (there was a hint on this).
Crafting will be used for Furniture.

So in this sense, we need to get out of our heads the 'traditional' purposes of crafting: That it will create good weapons/armours for us. And accept that it has a new and different purpose in this realm.

(Personally, not thrilled about that, I liked customizing my effective gear).