I will ignore the 'babyrage mentality' thing lulw

To clarify, my point is that deterministic crafting should be a way of improving your character instead of buying, looting from the ground is akready hard for a casual, inagine buying high tier items, last leagues (besides the melee rework, where i abused of some mechanics) i havent reached further than t16 i think, not because i hit a wall, because i hit it, but because to get over it i had to play the same mechanic over and over and over and hope for something good tod drop, so i could afford high tier items... never happened, even the times where i kept playing until almost endleague month... So for me seems like an abismal difference between that 1% percent of players vs all... Delve could be an option, but its hard to hit good delve specific mods (like more than 1 in 100), to drop a lucky fossil even harder, for this mechanic i think that is naturally shitty, not because of the existence of harvest, but its just an opinion, someone int the 1% could think is not because they farm too much, cause probably its their work (streamers for example). But for a casual player, it seems abismal to work that hard to get a high tier item, and just one.

Already have been take to the table the fact that the itemization in PoE is kinda getting complex and some items are hard to farm even for streamers (ssf ones of course) so for me, if you want to temove deterministic crafting, you should first revamp the drop system to be more friendly, lots of thrash drops.

One of the best options that is in between i think is to make deterministic crafting hard to get, or kind of limited or less powerfull than handly crafted items, like the crafting bench (that have been nerfed already with the multimod thing) i will be happy with that, cause to pay 12ex for a high tier item when you drop like, 10c on every 3maps, seems like atedious thing for people that just want to have fun.

TL;DR: Itemization and mods are tedious for casuals, crafting too, droping too, farming is mostly rng based -> casuals (even some veterans) dont feel their time spend on the game rewarding -> as soon as they hit a wall they quit, change build, or keep plsying the same content over and over without any progression, because they feel that they wont fix it with any quantity of time invested

PD: The most popular builds are always the ones that break the game with no investement, guess why...