What bothers you most about the current synthesis system?

[Molly_Millions]

Something they could do instead, is make the system more akin to combat, where you have a couple bars to gauge (Perhaps durability being similar to your HP and progress being the craft's HP, in this analogy), and several actions to interact with these gauges, whether slowing durability loss, increasing progress gain, restoring durability, and other such factors. This would make crafting more engaging, while at the same time not completely changing the genre.

I might go for something like that if they spiced it up a bit more somehow. I'm not married to the idea of a puzzle game. As I said earlier, there are a million different ways they could improve crafting. increasing XP gains just alleviates the pain, there is SOOOOO much more they could do instead.