This idea basically kills the usefulness of crafting in my mind. The idea is that if you put up with the grind of crafting then you could take a ton of mats and make it into a useful item.

Good luck finding beta testers for crafting on live after this...I doubt you'll have enough people bothering with it to test anymore.

I'm also kicking myself that I didn't beat my head against the brick wall to get to high crafting levels and craft up shards when they're still reasonable to make. At least I can say that I didn't waste my time on what's shaping up to be a worthless long-term feature of high level crafting.