IMO, the one size fits all crafting design isn’t working well. Gearing and leveling aside, no matter how they rebalance and simplify crafting mechanics, it’s still too complicated for most players who really don’t care about learning the system. The end result is a niche crafting scene that is far too small for the developers pay attention to.
I believe that there really should be tiered difficulty levels in terms of recipes:
1. Quick, easy crafts that don’t require much more effort than a WOW style crafting system. There have to be items to draw in the crowds. With more participants, there will be more reason for the developers to spend time working on more compelling content. I’d recommend easy items that possibly cannot be HQed but should still be somewhat relevant (ie. hypothetical non-meldable i250 gear in 3.4 for instance). These crafts can also incentivize players to level a crafting class, which could lead to an interest in more difficult stuff later.
2. HW style intermediate level master crafts. These are fine for beginner to intermediate level crafters as you would be able to HQ them reliably while following a rotation and making some small optimization adjustments. These would be tailored for the style of crafting that the vast majority of dedicated end game crafters in ARR and HW favor. So it should probably be the standard difficulty for HQable items. Relatively low in difficulty but requiring you to have a small understanding of mechanics and RNG manipulation.
3. Advanced level crafts for crafters who want to master and fully utilize the system. The only crafts seen so far have been the master 2 tokens from ARR and to a lesser extent the level 50 4* crafted materials. These crafts would require a crafter to fully optimize their strategy in the same way that was required to reliably HQ the master 2 tokens. Examples of these crafts could be crafted “ornate” style gear or higher item level raid capable gear, some of which could even be untradeable. As well, recipes could include even more difficult crafted tokens that can be traded for special, unique rewards and glamours.
The major issue with the HW balance is that there is no incentive for anyone to move beyond using a suboptimal rotation unless they want to produce items to sell on the mb rapidly. Crafters are largely stuck inside the box and I’ve noticed a trend of new crafters simply putting up a few items on the mb briefly and then disappearing altogether. There is no compelling content or anything to aim for that can keep them around.
Another issue is that crafting, in general, is downright simplistic when compared to other things like battle mechanics. More complex mechanics can be introduced for advanced level or intermediate level crafts and it would be refreshing to see things like new conditions and effects. The whistle specialist ability did tease us with new conditional effects like the increase in efficiency for certain abilities when the whistle stack is a multiple of 3. This kind of effect is important for single class crafting, but the implementation wasn’t great due to your lack of control over whistle stack changes.