This is an extremely hard question to answer.

I'll answer the easier one now and try and type up something for the harder one. SWG crafting was so wonderful because it gave you so much flexibility. If you didn't want to put in alot of work and just make generic stuff to grind with, you could use the cheap stuff that wasn't great. but if you were making something really good that you knew would be valuable to someone, you took your time in building it. You found the best materials you could, you collected as much as you could. then you slowly built it.

I think the reason why it was so nice is you chose how much work you put into it. If you didn't want to work very hard and didn't care about cheap stuff you could toss later, you could do that. If you were crafting for a profit, you took your time and you made more money. Also the fact that everyone couldn't be the same just because they were a crafter. You had to do more then just hit a few buttons together to make an item, you actually had to think some. There were many times I saw 2 people with the same skills make the same item. One would be fantastic and everyone would want it, the other would be junk.

I think that's the biggest thing about he SWG, it made crafters mean something. It wasn't just click a few times here and there, they actually had to think.