Quote Originally Posted by LineageRazor View Post

Compared against that, the crafting system in FFXIV is amazingly fun. You have real control over how things turn out. Admittedly, it's a system that favors mathematicians; leveraging probabilities to produce the best results over the long term is what crafting is all about. Some folks, though, just can't seem to wrap their head around the idea that just because a CAN go catastrophically wrong doesn't mean that it WILL. Murphy's Law is a big, fat lie. And, even if that odd failure crops up, you have plenty of successes to balance it out.
.....and you just gave away the secret to crafting successfully. Aside from planning out a rotation that gives you the best expected results, the better you are at manipulating the odds during a craft, the better your HQ yields will be. The key is to actively assess the situation on a constant basis and look for opportunities to improve your probabilities of success.