Thankfully this isnt WoW where professions and much of the rest of the content has been gutted to either be useless/worthless or incredibly quick and simple so the l33t tryhard raiders dont feel "forced" to do it for the power boosts, you can pretty much powerlevel your profession to the max day one of an xpac by spending a couple of hours at most.

I like ff14 crafting because it is deep and interesting and more importantly an enormous area of content for people who like to delve in it, something I definitely plan on delving into in the future because it is so interesting and fun.