Take this question into consideration:
Q: Will the level cap be removed before the release of 2.0?
A: This is not planned until patch 1.21. It won’t be good to have a huge gap in players’ level until 2.0 goes live, so we would like to carefully weigh our options.

With Guild marks players who have been to 50 for a while have the option to obtian new abilities. See the issue at hand is the process of obtaining abilities through Guild marks wasn't fleshed out like it should have been. The way Guild marks should have worked is every 2-3 months or with every VU they introduce 2-4 new abilities for each class and players would have the option of purchasing them or not. They could range from an elemental difference to an attack to a completely different ability. They could even be traits taht augment the dmg, TP cost or range of an attack you already have. There were a lot of options they could go with it, but by eliminating it in sucha way it's like they haven't even considered how it could be used to flesh out a class without just giving them the abilities outright or having them increase the lv cap.

Heck the whole point behind gaining abilities through the NPC was basically being trained to learn the techniques that guild knew and you could only obtain the higher ranked ones when you earned their respect aka did the class quest at hand. I had always thought that had they actually kept adding abilities to the Guild, it would build up to a nice amount where a player would be able to define themselves better with their class if they chose just to level one class rather then leveling other classes. With Marauder the concept could easily be, Marks to improve parrying and parry counter abilities, marks that granted range abilities or improves the range of attacks, and then basically single target attacks with different power and TP cost to them.

Like, what are they gonna do with the attribute traits next update are they just going to remove them? Personally I have relied on those abilities to improve my crafting success rate since every little boost helps, I"d hate to lose those. As well as the books I've just purchased for my craft classes, is that to say the whole point of making Guild Marks easier to get for your class and improving the means in which one could obtain leves was just a big waste of time? Honestly why make all these changes then remove Guild Marks from the system.

For the books, they could have easily made it where you define each recipe with a book and by having said book it would make the synth work better in your favor. Then perhaps for the synths 40+ you would have to have the book just to be on equal ground but if you don't then you'll be at a disadvantage when trying to synth.

Books take a while to obtain depending on how you go about recieving them and with that in mind they could have continued to add more books to crafting to increase sucess rate but instead of passive KI books that are always active, add ones you set to your ability list. The books would basically be passive effects that improve your odds while crafting which could range from decrease rate of elemental spark with x element to improved odds wit certain synths.

There's just a lot of variables that Guild Marks can offer and I'm just surprised that they want to get rid of that. If anything I just hope that they may consider just leave the books, leave the traits, if they want to make abilities learned through levels for now sure but to still consider how the system could work to improve a person's ability to customize their character to their liking.