Yoshi and Square have always been very staunch that they designed this game to be a WoW clone. It was intended to be a very superficial, surface level action game intended to cater to the quick fix, raider heavy player base with a Final Fantasy wrapper. Unfortunately, unless they decide to change their mind on that crafting will never be anything in this game than an obligatory addition to appease some requirement to include 'some' crafting element.

As the comments in this thread have shown support for this kind of a change will be very difficult as they already have an entrenched player base that enjoys the end game drop/token grind and are going to fight tooth and nail any concept that would include having to either level or god forbid, talk to a crafter. As more of these players grind out and leave we may eventually see Square interested in focusing on the needs of the long term crafting types but honestly by then some other better crafting game will have launched and they will all be gone anyway.