1 - I belive everyone was saying before that shields were only craftable and never showed for sale or as loot drops. Everyone was actually saying that this fact was a very good reason to pick crafting alone. I was merely going along with it but if it's not true, even more of a reason not to craft.
2 - Well if you can't buy mk5 grenades I guess they just haven't been implemented for sale yet or they might never be. But it takes 112 I think just to get to them. So an average intelligence character gets that when, level 20? Right........................
3 -
A - You shouldn't be crafting appropriate level gear. Again that is ridiciculous. What you find as soon as you arive in junkyard for example is gear that is higher level than you, this is why it's not worth it to craft. You should be able to craft even better gear at this point. Again, crafting should always keep you ahead of the curve, never behind at any point during the game. I'll keep saying this till he end of times.
B - Are you really going to tell me that you don't have the required money to buy all the expendable craftables throughout the game?.. Sure you might not be able to buy the very best, example being the MK5 grenade but you do buy most things.
C - Not it doesn't and you know it doesn't. I've already told you that transforming thousands of charrons into repair kits which you still wouldn't be able to sell all but those you would only turn to a few hundred is not a solution, it's as good a solution as leaving stuff behind for all purposes and effects... Loot is never junk, loot is money!
D - I saw your post and yeah, if you're lucky and get some appropriate low level stuff that you can craft then sure, you can make something hard a little bit easier. But just as syphoner skin is something new, can't you just buy stuff from the stores made out of it? Even if you can't all you're saying is. Sure, use crafting to get through a single quest easier. Still not worth the investment.
4 - I will not say I know exactly how much skills I need in crafting, but I know that 100 is not something light, it's something at very least level 17. Not like you max one skill in 5 levels and then max the next in another 5 levels so you can tier it up slowly. The investment is rather heavy because you almost always need multiple crafting types... Chemistry is a bad example there, for mk5 grenades they need a very high skill, borderline insane if you are to ask me. Besides you do say you don't need more than 100 for most things. I don't know, the higher quallity the stuff is, the more skill it asks, if you put attachements, each one is going to increase the total skill by 10%. While I haven't been there because crafting has mostly been a waste of time, I can see things escalating easily above 100 unless components that require more than 80 points do not exist.
5 - My earlier problem with the crafting was never the lack of materials, it was the absurdly high requirements of it! That problem is still not addressed and Styg pretty much said he is not going to change it. It is his game however so it's his right to say how things are made. I feel however that when the game is released that nearly no one will go crafting route as it is.
Last and never least. While you could be right that at some point players look more into equipment than levels for power (quite frankly I always look into both for power at any point) there is a limit to how much stuff you can do. Many builds completly make crafting unviable. I crafting is supposed to ever become a requirement to late game then a lot is lost because of it which means, poor balance. Crafting should keep you ahead of the curve because characters who craft can't do a lot of other stuff thus they power their way with better equipment. Characters without crafting are more powerful in other areas so they don't need the extra power from equipment, simple balance... I think that despite combat mechanics being clear it won't change much. The vast majority will not like the crafting system and not use it. Just as many people will not like the carry weight which is unbearably low even for a 10 str character. They will also not like the economic system. Whether some of these things will have an option to be turned off or made better I do not know, but if not I'm sure people will start modding the game to solve these problems. Right now that do is my only hope. That the game gets released and someone mods it to deal with the carry weights, merchants and crafting.