In my opinion, the actual act of crafting, the addition of the crafting log, etc are significantly improved from 1.0. However, currently there is almost no reason to be a high level crafter aside from making weapons for the relic quest and the level 50 DoH/DoL "AF" gear. Everything you can craft for DoW/DoM is so cost prohibitive just to make a single item, and only the HQ versions even come close to surpassing anything readily available through other content. At this point in the game, there isn't really much "end-game" value to being a crafter. So on that side of things, crafting in 1.0 was vastly superior.