Let us craft from Retainer Inventory

[HurtigeKarl]

You are overemphasizing and overestimating the strategic elements added by micro managing item transfers between retainer and main inventory. It's really nowhere near as strategic as you make it sound. I'm curious, would you be a proponent of say reducing the main inventory space to 10 slots? After all, you could argue that it forces players to think more about what they are going to use those 10 slots for. There are ways of making a system more strategic/engaging without making it cumbersome and tedious to the player.
Also, you have not touched on the fact that removing a less strategic forced step would increase the overall time you spent on the strategic part of crafting.

The mechanical act of crafting, i.e. pressing the buttons during a craft session, is not the strategic part. That's just a timesink, but a good such in the sense that you are forced to think more before the physical crafting. The strategy should already have been thought of and done before you even start the physical crafting.

Once you have crafted enough, like I have, you don't even have to think about the crafting per se anymore. You would already have an idea of how much time different crafts take in comparison to each other and what buttons you need to click and how your success rate is.

So what do I have to think about: time management, pricing and #selling slots. There are so many ways to get profit, but every person has 2 limited "resources": time and # selling slots. By introducing more and more variables to the time management problem, you force me to think more.

You got a valid point though: if you already were spending all your time thinking about other things, like the crafting system, then it would not make sense introducing a complex inventory management system as well to think about. However, the reality is that when you reach crafting endgame, there is a hell lot of time when you don't have to think at all and you just do because you've already thought enough, that's why the current or a more thought-inducing inventory management system is necessary: it introduces more thought in a endgame where there is far too little thought required.

If you know and execute each step blindly (like a macro would) before the crafting has even started, then you are not 100% optimizing the quality you can get because of Goods/Excellent and their timing. That is fine if you have a buffer to work with and can 100% HQ the item 100% of the time with a macro, but otherwise, you need the human strategic element to adapt to when goods/excellent pop up and how to make the best use of them. There's more satisfaction crafting a lv40 HQ item when you are say lv35 than monotonously moving items around between your retainer and your inventory.

EDIT: because of posting limitations, I will probably respond to anything by editing this very post.

You make it sound as if I would be completely surprised and amazed if I had a "good" or "excellent" happening. Of course the plan you figure out before crafting (endgame crafting) already knows exactly what to do when you get a "good" or "excellent" in different situations, so there is no actual thought to speak of when you see "good" or "excellent" happen, you know exactly what to do in such situations.

I suppose midgame crafting would be the point where you would find inventory management something that simply removes time you can use to optimize your crafting, because at that point you may not have enough experience to know exactly what to do in different situations, but you may have so many items so that inventory management becomes a problem to solve. During endgame crafting, you no longer really have to think much if at all about the crafting itself, so every little bit of extra thinking required counts at that point.

Edit: To be more precise what I mean about endgame crafting: the point where you have several classes where you can guarantee 100% HQ on i70 item.