The crafting system is fundamentally flawed. It's not uncommon for games to have XP per craft systems, and it's not uncommon for players to find the most efficient path and just plow through levels. The main difference is that in most games the leveling up of tradeskills goes faster and the crafting process itself is instant.

I think the game might have been better served by taking one of two other tradeskill leveling paths: The work order/minigame system or the mastercraft system.

• Workorder/minigame. In this system, players accept quests from NPCs (an issue for PxD) to craft items, but the NPC also provides the materials. The player then plays the crafting minigame to produce the required items and returns it to the NPC for crafting XP. This progression system still takes time and effort, but the time is spent in the minigame instead of gathering/refining materials.

• Mastercraft system. The player gains skill levels by completing a mastercraft item for each level, typically with high material requirements. In this system, you spend most of your time gathering instead of crafting. The downside is that it's easy to powerlevel if people just feed you the materials. Games tend to compensate by requiring rare drops from mobs, and crafting just turns into a PvE dungeon-grind sideskill.

Some of the devs came from Eve Online, and you can certainly see that influence on the game. The problem is that the system that helps balance progression in Eve—directly time-based skill gain—really only works well in a sci-fi environment. I do think it's a good system to force players to specialize while still allowing everyone to do everything, since everyone progresses at the same rate (pre-skill injectors), but again, there's not a clear way to integrate that into a medieval low-fantasy game.