The Joy of Crafting

[MANTASTIC]

This can be said about everything you typed. None of this has been documented by SE. It's all player speculation and I would bet that everyone has counter examples for each. I think that players are generally perturbed by the fact that SE never clarifies anything. They'd rather that the player piss through all their resources attempting to decipher SE secret formulas only to discover randomness.

Q. I haven't been having much success crafting items. What am I doing wrong?
A. The colored, glowing graphics provides players with a large hint toward a successful synthesis. When the glow is white, the synthesis is at its most stable, and the chances of success are high. When the glow takes on a color, however, the chances of success are low. Players seeking simple completion of their synthesis rather than high-quality results should attempt to use the Wait command when the indicator is colored to restore the stability of the synthesis before finishing it.

Q. Is there a trick to synthesizing high-quality items?
A. Though synthesis actions carried out while the colored circle graphic is red suffer a reduced rate of success, they often serve to increase the quality of the synthesis. In addition, the successful execution of consecutive actions also serves to increase quality. Ultimately, the higher the quality of the synthesis process, the more likely it is to yield a high-quality result.

source

And that's about as much information as SE has provided on the mechanics of crafting as far as I know. Not to argue that crafting is fine(far from it, see my other posts), but not all the "player beliefs" surrounding the current trainwreck that is crafting are unfounded.

[Madruk]

Get hand of the gods, problem solved. You'll hardly fail a synth.

In before but that's so much WORK.

P.S. HQ crafting is worthless for now, don't bother with it.