Honestly, hot take here, but you should probably ban anyone automatically whose character concept is "a crafter". It's a peculiarly game-ised concept that always requires disproportionate amounts of dev time and warps the game around it. You can accept characters who can do such things, but it can't be the focus of their character.
Hotter take - most RPGs would be vastly improved if devs stopped enabling the idea of "the crafter" when they're not going to do the same for other long-term options.
But... but crafting...
*sigh* Okay, I will grant you that crafting is
really really hard to do right in an interesting way. And that I've never once seen a game that did a really good job of it, and only a few that have sufficiently done good job that I think there's something to be learned from them other than "how not to do it." All of which are video games.
.... but dammit, I love the
idea, of being ... honestly, what I think of as "a real wizard", someone who can sit down and look out at the world and say "if I want to work this miracle, I need those parts in this configuration," and then
just do it. Some of that is Sorcery. Some of that is crafting. (And a lot of it is outright Charm creation or writing your own fluff, lol). Most of all, though -- it's a feeling you
absolutely cannot get from any amount of ... of limited spell lists and pre-balanced Charms, something that you can only vaguely touch upon with freeform magic like Mage or Ars Magica, the feeling of really biting your teeth into a good engineering problem and
making something work.
I would be very sad if people gave up on crafting in games.
Particularly in tabletop games, which until we get safe AI good enough to be an ST is the closest we're ever going to come to being a freeform mage in real life. Computer games just can't handle that degree of lateral thinking yet -- except games that are basically nothing but alt-physics simulators or that otherwise are basically entirely designed about the idea of building a world. I don't think I've ever seen a game that both has a nontrivial crafting system
and a meaningful plot.
(My answer to your second point is that they probably
should do the same for other long-term options, lol. How many times have we complained that Exalted doesn't have a Bureaucracy system, or even much of a social system -- and so for a game that's supposed to be more about being sorcerer-kings that rule the world, it's awfully hard to actually run a nation-building game.)
