Goodbye Ingenuity

[Jojoya]

Games 7-8 years older have sported more innovative systems.

What games and what made their crafting systems so interesting/innovative compared to what we have in FFXIV?

So that justifies over simplifying it to WoW’s extent?

It's not even close to being as simple as WoW's crafting system. Crafting in WoW was get mats, press a button, done. You could do it completely naked. Blizzard made it harder to get recipes than to do the actual crafting (frequently you had to be a raider on top of being a crafter).

[Kabooa]

What games and what made their crafting systems so interesting/innovative compared to what we have in FFXIV?

Star Wars Galaxies.

Resources had varied stats and temporary windows to gather - This meant "Iron" was more suitable for different crafts based on what it rolled. Part of the crafting game was the search for good materials instead of playing whack a mole. Pushed players out into the world and to explore it.

Everything decayed and wore down, and eventually needed replacing,even gear.

Crafting was both manual and automated, and in the system as it was designed, a crafter designed item attributes and colors to their own specifications, and not a binary "useful/ useless" scale. Manual crafting was done with special materials, or to create a blueprint to be used in automated crafting. Both manual and automated crafting were parts of the process.

For example - Some recipes required ten "identical" components, and you cannot manually craft identical components. You made a blueprint to do that even if you manually craft the final product.