I understand that the community needs to work together but those shard swapping that I mentioned benefit all the parties and makes it really consistent to keep crafting.
At level 30+ each crafting attempt costs more than 4 shards, and then it starts to move onto crystals and clusters. It just does not work, considering that shards give no xp to any gathering class above level 10, and that to even get the botanist/miner wards to apply to crystals and clusters you need to level them beyond 40, which is a huge amount of grinding to achieve that.

Not to mention that people keep increasing the price of shards like Ice/Earth And Water/Lightning because they know that an armorer or alchemist is going to dig into those regardless of price, the burden is on classes like armorer and alchemists because they will always be required to either mine/harvest them for 1 each attempt (with the occasional 2 per attempt) or pay the price to the point of not covering the profit of what they craft.