I really don't think this is as big of a deal as some of you are making it out to be, I'm running some comparisons with the crafting gear available at 38+ and I'm not even sure I'd want to use the crakows in any case, I'd rather have the control afforded by the linen gaiters. From what I've been able to do by playing around with the gear available, I've found that if you strike up a balance between the three crafting stats (as you probably should due to our ignorance as to their specific effects excluding control), with non-gc gear you can get 32-39-34 MCraft-Craft-Control from non-dated items, and with GC gear that can go to 43-35-39. Now using armorer as an example, at 48 their main tool gives 64-76-82 for a combined non-GC balanced set of 96-115-116 and a GC balanced set of 107-111-121, you gain 16.5% MCraft, and exchange 3.4% Craft for 4.1% Control.

Sure, flames may have a slight advantage over non-flames, but I really don't think it's as huge as people are making it out to be. That huge % difference between the GC gear and the next best non-GC counterpart doesn't look so big when you take the whole picture into account (and btw the difference between FS Sarouel and the Woolen Sarouel is 7 not 8).

Feel free to play with the numbers more, the attempt of putting together a balanced set of (albeit miss-matched) gear was just based on manipulation of available options by hand and I haven't run it through any kind of optimization formulas, I will however gladly post the spreadsheet I have containing the info I used though, as the input process was kind of a drag.