Hello,

Grinding DOES NOT EQUAL better, thrilling, and challenging.
Remember when we had to level all 8 to cap then set cross-class skills so they all operated the same? ...just to grind out tools (not really skill) in ARR/HW?

Remember Maker's Mark and Flawless Synthesis? Remember those cute 64 stacks under 6377 difficulty for Stormblood 2 star craft/gatherer gear? That also was annihilated by macros later.

Remember when it was a thing to use Steady Hand II + Great Strides + Ingenuity II + Innovation + Byregot's Miracle + Great Strides + Byregot's Brow?
and back then brow had a 100% success rate under specialization?

Difficulty? Whats that!?
We had Steady Hand II and Reclaim back then, Stealing the Chance out of Chance Macros.

I used to do
Muscle Memory + Inner Quiet + Steady Hand II + Piece by Piece + Prudent Touch x 2 + Patient Touch x 2.

This had a 64% chance of working.
If it did, I was already over 50% in progress and at 11 IQ Stacks.
If it failed, I would just use Reclaim and Botch the craft to have a 90% chance of reclaiming materials.

So 1/10th chance to lose my materials on a 36% chance of failure....
where upon success I know I will go from 0 - 100% on light melds with food....
How do you think I went from nothing to fully pentemelded in a week after getting Goddess of the Hand in SB? Then I went to safer macros.....

Today, Chance Macros has a MUCH HIGHER chance of failure.

Reflect + Patient Touch x 2 has a 75% Chance of failure and no Reclaim to fall back on.

Expert-Recipes are more pliant-RNG dependent.

I wish there could be a Savage-Level version of crafting that gave us our own soulbound savage-iLvL gear once a week for crafters to show we really are a big deal, but that would take making Crafting more non-linear and making people actually THINK and not beat everything with macros.