Crafting Endgame has always revolved primarily around Gathering, with a few Combat-based mats sprinkled in. Any change to this would make Gathering less appealing which has a variety of implications to our markets on it's own.

In my honest opinion, right now there is nothing wrong with Favors themselves, rather the limited number of "useful" mats that can be obtained while using them. I consider a useful mat to be anything that costs at the very least more than a single crystal. If the Nodes that the Favors could proc off of held mats that you would farm anyways, either to use yourself or to sell, Favors would just be a major icing on that sweet Gathering cake, or vice versa for Crafters.

As it stands, out of the 5 areas and Nodes that can be farmed using Favors, Miners have 3/5 areas giving them "useful" mats with Yellows having Hardsilver Sand/Cloud Mica, Violets having Aurum Regis Sand, and Blues having Hardsilver ore, while Botanists have only a single "useful" mat that can be farmed which is Birch Logs while farming Void Nut Favors (Which have a horrible spawn placement btw). Every other area has mats that are often worth less than just farming crystals. This is also my theory as to why Ooids are always in higher stock and at lower prices than Botanist Favor Mats.

I'm sure plenty of Crafters would be much more willing to Gather if they had the incentive of making an additional profit or stocking up on mats while farming Favors, and Gatherers would be more willing to use Favors as an additional income to something they would have farmed anyways. I'm always happy to farm Yellow/Violet/Blue Ooids because I know I will make a definite profit while farming them. I could just buy the mats straight from the market and still make a profit, but when farming Favors is my priority the extra materials become my icing.