You shouldn’t need a sim for you to reliably design a viable approach, especially as SB has been designed to be more intuitive as you don’t need to consider statistics anymore when determining skill priority. With enough practice (on materials, etc), you’ll get to the point where you can get a very good idea of what you need to do just by looking at the required quality and progress requirements. Yes, even if the game had crafts that gave you progress/quality requirements from a more or less random pool, you should be able to ace them (designers should not include requirements that cannot be done with the min required stats). If you’re unable to effectively design on the fly, can you say you have truly mastered crafting?

Case in point: When the i320 crafter gear was first released (first time we saw 28.5k quality crafts and our stats were far worse than what we had for 3* and 4*!), a lot of players found them challenging to 100% using full HQ mats, never-mind starting with i290 gear and all NQ mats. If you understood the crafting process, all NQ runs should not have been difficult. You would already have known that your Byregot’s blessing finisher gave you 11k quality from previous 2* crafts and could easily determine what you needed to do to come up with the other 17.5k. The trick was simply to get your IQ stacks as high as possible before firing off a barrage of at least 9 ingenuity 2 buffed touches; around 25% of the time, you could manage 13 ingen 2 buffed touches. You also got enough CP for an average of 16 touches. You don’t need a simulator to figure that out.

I managed 86% on my first blind run and moved my results to 90-100% (100% around 60% of the time but I never did optimize it before upgrading) with some refinements. Imagine if the game forced you to craft from all NQ with stats capped at the i290 gear…..

The truth is that those crafts were very easy to HQ even at min requirements and all NQ mats if you had a solid grasp of crafting mechanics but very hard to HQ if you didn’t. They would have served as an excellent and fair skill check if the game forced you to craft under those conditions. But given the way the game is balanced (lots of HQ mats, major over-gearing), most players will never learn, which is a shame.

Back in ARR, sims were counterproductive to your learning as the idea was (and still is if you truly want to master crafting) to design a crafting methodology (on the fly prioritization, optimization, adjustments to changes in the situation etc). If the i320s were considered difficult at 0 starting quality and i290 gear, it’s no wonder crafters did poorly on ARR’s master 2 tokens. That’s what was satisfying about ARR crafting. The balance created divisions in player proficiency and you were rewarded with excellent results only if you took the time to truly master the system.