Square Enix, please think about both Casual AND Hardcore crafters..

[Kabooa]

ask yourself this: if crafting was so easy and never hard like you say, why did i not see you craft competitively everyday back in older patches? when hasty touch was still active????

You mean other than we're on different data centers?

And as has already been mentioned - Time.

Crafting was never hard. It was however heavily time gated. In a game that has myriad content for a player to focus on, choosing even one area to focus on means you simply do not have the time for others.

If you didn't care for gil or didn't need gil (Mercenary clearing for people is quite lucrative), you're probably not going to do crafting in ARR, or even Heavensward at expansion launch.

And not everyone crafts for gil. Crafting has myriad perks associated to it. The assumption that every crafter is your competition is flawed because quite a few people only leveled them for personal use.