In all truth tanaka never got to fully realize his vision, the real problems with the game were not his vision, but the execution. Brutal and horrible lag, poorly implemented features, lack of content, bugs. As producer, this isnt really your job perse, but someone had to take the fall so they could make a strong statement that they were going to change the game, and acknowlege thier screw ups.

And yeah crafters were supposed to have a role in battle, not a large one, and they wouldnt get exp out of it, but they were supposed to serve a purpose. All in all the vision as a whole made a lot of sense, they did have some inconsistencies though that came from trying to appease the masses, and from not figuring the best way to implement some of thier systems.
See a before, a crafter does nothing negative for the party, some one not being active in combat didnt effect your sp gain, parties had high player limits, so in general adding a crafter wouldnt be a big deal. the crafter could fix your gear (which degraded faster) and theoretically give you some buffs, or debuff enemies. Main problem with this though, is why would the crafter go with you? the only exp he would get was from fixing gear, which didnt break that much, and didnt award hax exp. There are a couple of spots here and there where someone killing stuff in the area can let them gather, but that doesnt apply to disciplines of the hand.

Anyhow his vision had a lot of potential, but it never got realized. We may in fact see some of these systems in future games, better tweaked and people may love them. Fact is, too many basic problems were present on release, and most people never got to understand the systems at work because the basic bugs and miscalculations turned them off.