People didnt quit because they didnt have the time or patience to max crafters, but people did quit because they took that unique endgame away from them. People did quit because it was now so accessible that crafting was a sidething, and not a mainthing anymore. They made crafting into a sidecontent. From omnicrafters and people actually having gear to hq craft things being rare, to everyone being able to craft anything.

Accessibility can be good if done right and implementing some kind of other "lock" instead of time that forces you to still rely on others in crafting. Accessibility can hurt the individuality and layers of a game, the high goals that you look to obtain over a long period of time, which mmorpgs are meant to span over, if they make it obtainable to everyone even if they dont really have an interest in it.

I still adore the game, it is very much a home, and I've already gone on for too long to also involve the raiding and extremes... but I feel that their focus on accessibility has slowly started to push away the core playerbase of the game for easy and fast rewards. And the rewards that you can aim for and take a long while to reach are often even less rewarding and has less effort put on them than the easier to gain content.

Balance. If you're gonna make something accessible and easy, please also make a counterweight, because right now I feel that more and more things become accessible that wasnt to everyone before, but at the same time lacks any counterweight that still makes it actually worth spending time on it.

What it does right now is take away effort and time, and thats all it does. People might complain about things not being accessible to everyone, but it is rarer that people leave a game because of them not want to put effort into it, than people leaving because an endgame they loved doing became so accessible that it fairly much lost it's value as a potent endgame, and became more of a sidecontent but available to everyone.

Thank you for the time you took reading this, and please keep an open mind before pushing the feedback down. This is all from my own personal experience and opinions. Hope you have a nice day.