As someone who mainly focuses on battle classes, but have levelled up many crafters/gatherers to lv.60, it's easy to say that crafters have it much harder than common adventurers.

However after 4.0, surprisingly much work was done to battle classes to get rid of the past's mistakes such as the necessity of cross class skills and to put some classes more in line with each other.

I believe these are really great changes, but I'm disappointed these weren't put across to crafters.

Crafters face many similar problems to battle classes. Cross class skills are absolutely necessary which means you'd have to spend much more time levelling up many classes. You'd also want to level up multiple crafters due to many materials being required from other disciplines.