I don't know if you could get crafters to buy into a system where miqo'te scream at their cakes when they have a critical success. Would scare the crap out of me in the guild.

There are a lot of crafters who craft because it's a solo activity, especially in Japan. That's probably the biggest barrier to changing crafting to party play, all the people who didn't sign up to craft to party.

I just don't know if you can make crafting fun and engaging as a solo activity without completely redoing it as its own 100 hour sub-RPG. People say they want to be engaged and have fun but what does that mean...functionally that means an entire other retail game just for crafting and gathering. One that scores at least a 6/10 on its own.