I have a feeling we'll be seeing more difficult recipes in the future which make use of the specialist system. I suspect that those recipes will also be far easier to HQ as a melded crafter than unmelded, to maintain balance. As mentioned in the post, their intention is to give advantages to players who do meld while still giving access to the recipes for those other crafters.

At the moment, it's highly gated. You can't even come close to 4-star crafting without a single meld, so it'll be interesting to see how this plays out alongside the level cap rise.