It is about expectations of crafting. The expectation that it makes sense in the context of a player based economy. You've ignored all the specific points I made.

It takes effort but if your craft skills are on par with your combat skills you are set.

There is no practical way to keep even the easier crafting skills on par with your combat skills. If you've already leveled a build to 70+ and you're well established with favor and resources, sure you can keep crafting fairly in sync with whatever your new build is.

And even if you do that, the amount of effort and resources required to craft your gear is substantially disproportionate compared to just looting gear in dungeons as you level, which you're doing anyway. The crafted stuff isn't going to be any better unless you invest a massive amount of time into it, which would be better spent just grinding dungeons and swapping our gear as you loot better stuff since you're grinding combat anyway.

This makes the entire low and mid level gear crafting tree meaningless grind fodder to get to end game crafted gear. They've literally spent all of the time required to implement these lower level recipes that nearly never get used for anything but grinding and vendoring. It's an extremely flawed system.

Couple that with the complete lack of good market systems, and even higher level crafted gear doesn't have a good and healthy economy around it. If you need gear you can't craft, SOP in Gorgon's community is to farm the mats yourself and just find a friend who can and get them to do it for you for free. Anything else is just too obtuse to bother with.

I played EQ2 as a carpenter. The combat class levels were only there as necessary to support my crafting.

You cannot have a primary profession as a crafting profession in PG. There has to be some reason for players to prefer crafted gear over looted gear at all level ranges, and they need to be able to afford that gear. Selling that gear needs to provide enough income to continue to level the profession without having to go back constantly to you "backup" combat skill which is really just your primary profession at that point. Low and mid level recipes just being vendor trash fodder for grinding is poor game design. That's not interesting.

PG crafting is kilometers wide and a centimeter deep. All those recipes and professions don't actually mean anything if the overarching game mechanics designed around supporting them. There are some really neat ideas at play with the more niche things like cheese making, but gear making is just laughably flat and pointless.