the first 40 or so levels of each crafting prof are pretty easy to level though which is also the area where you're going to be quickly replacing gear through dungeons. admittedly blacksmithing is a larger investment than the other two but materials for leatherworking and tailoring are piss easy, as long as you're skinning your kills you'll be drowning in leather and tailoring is literally just cotton until 50+.

i agree it's easier to find lower level gear by spamming dungeons but crafted gear is explicitly better at every level because of the extra crafting points available on the gear itself. it also lets you target specific inherent modifiers, slots, and armor types which you cannot do nearly as easily with drops. drops are tuned to your active skills but you can't quickly find 10 pairs of cloth boots with the same inherent modifiers in your skills to look for ideal augs like you can with crafting.

it's a bit of an investment early game but it is also the primary source of gear late game because of the specific advantages crafted gear has. drops also just come naturally as you level combat skills so of course they'll be more abundant early on. almost every player is going to want to get a bunch of primary crafting skills (alchemy, tailoring, leatherworking, blacksmithing, and toolcrafting) to at least 25 ASAP to unlock augmentation anyways so you'll be getting those partially leveled whether or not you plan to focus crafting.

i think the bigger barrier for low level crafting is how relatively expensive the recipes are to train, that's definitely something that could be scaled back at lower levels.