crafting caps

[Nutz]

On the crafting side there are no caps. More craftsmanship will always give you more progress. There is a cap in practice where a certain craftsmanship rating is the highest useful rating to have (ie. you finish the most difficult craft in X steps and it's impossible to add enough craftsmanship to finish it in X-1 steps). Control is a bit more fluid. Again there is no hard cap, but given a fixed rotation there will be a point where adding more control is of little to no value. Of course, depending on the rotation you might be able to offset failed hasty touches with more control, but most rotations account for normal conditions and statistically reasonable failure rates on actions that are <100% successful.

On gathering there are definite caps per item level (of items gathered). I have mostly good gear on my MIN and BOT and have not reached those caps yet. It probably is possible with fully melded Ironworks gear, but I haven't checked. These are significantly less important milestones to hit, of course, as just qualifying to gather at a node (and more recently get the occasional +1-2 attempts bonus) is like 95% of the possible reward. Pumping up the HQ rate to 15% and the gather rate to 95% is nice, but doesn't make an enormous difference, especially if gathering from normal nodes. On the collectibles side of things, the perception cap is much lower than the 15% HQ rate cap. It's so low, in fact, that having even remotely decent gear is enough to do the vast majority of collectible gathering.

More specific to your question on hard numbers, for gathering I really wouldn't worry about it right now unless theres something you want to gather but currently cannot. For crafting I would consider what you want to craft/ regularly do craft. Use a simulator to see how your rotation works with your current stats (if for no other reason than to confirm the results are correct) and then try it out with the stats you could potentially have. Is there any difference? Did you finish 1 step earlier, potentially allowing you to swap a synth for a touch? Does the stat increase allow you to hit 100% quality with one fewer touch (the only way to simulate a failed touch). If the answers are no then there's not really any point. If the answers are yes then there might be some point, but only if you're not consistently reaching 100% quality right now. If it allows you to finish a step sooner but you didn't need that extra step to add quality anyway then there's not much point except to combat bad luck a little bit.