Crafting is fun!

[Gilthas]

Yet you don't have to...raiders can make their own potions or buy them. Crafters can gather their own materials or buy them.

Technically? Sure. In practice? No.

So much grind has been added to gathering and crafting that it is no longer feasible for the overwhelming majority of the playerbase to gather and craft their own stuff.

Crafting in XIV is one of the worse system ever. There is absolutely no reason to craft because 1) gils are useless (you get handled every piece of gear from dungeons 2) you dont need any piece of crafted gear since you can find those in dungeons.
The only reason to craft is culinary for food (even tho you could do content without it, but it helps) and alchemy pots (again you could do without it).

Now the fact that somebody enjoy crafting doesnt mean that the crafting system is well designed.
It has no meaning really, it could be a stellar system but they completely threw it out of the window with poor choices and very bad develop design. On top of this the market and economy is totally destroyed because HQing stuff that isnt very very high level, is basically 100% which shouldnt be.
Make it way harder to HQ items, that way the market wont collapse, there shouldnt be any 100% HQ synth.
Also to make crafters more valuable they should add items that drops from high end raids which you can craft the ultimate gear. This way you would make crafting useful.
at the moment is just...pots/food. 2/8 crafting classes useful.

Your logic is actually one of the reasons why gathering and crafting is so bad now, and your suggestions would just make it worse.

Developers catering to greedy players and only caring about keeping prices on the MB high is what's behind all the grind that was added to the system. Yet you want them to make prices higher and force more of the playerbase to gear up via the MB.

I'm all for DoH being capable of crafting BiS items, but before that can happen, gathering and crafting have to be brought back to reasonable levels, so players crafting their own gear can become a real option.