The gathering thing - as long as that's optional, and we can still gather one at a time, that could be a good idea. I personally quite like that we can't do all 4 (or 5) gathers at once. It makes gathering a little more interesting than run to node, hit button, run to next node, hit button. Not much more interesting, but a bit. I would also miss most of the rare items if I used a "gatherx4" button, since I usually hit the first one as soon as the window opens and only notice the rare item pop after - so it's useful to be able to switch!

Re crafting: we can already do that: Quick Synthesis. Although you lose a lot of XP, and again I find manually Synthesising more interesting (at least if I'm synthesising something at my crafting level).