Having worked on the massive crafting amount of crafting for an airship, I can totally empathize with people risking TOS violations with Real Money Transactions and Botting.

(1) The amount of shards required to craft goes up beyond all reason. The item you are crafting drains so much because of sub-steps to craft components.
This then leads to absolutely tedious and unrewarding gathering of literally hundreds of shards that provide so little XP I can't detect my XP bar moving even 1 pixel.

The alluring alternative then is to either bot gathering, or use RMT to buy shards off the market board where they are listed in vast quantities for obscene prices.

How about limiting the shard cost of crafting to ONE. No increase for higher-level recipes. Star recipes can use Crystals and Clusters, but again, ONLY ONE.

(2) If you use auto-synthesis you are losing not only High Quality items that you could crush out 100% of the time if you manually crafted or used a macro.
I have seen youtubes of a crafting bot that basically macros crafting and lets you do multiple items. This should be a standard feature of the game! Have auto-synthesis read the steps from a macro (that you can already do in the game) and time-compress the crafting.

And on the subject of macros for crafting -- I find it utterly sad that a third party internet website can write you a crafting macro more easily than making the macro in the game.