Sorry for not posting for a day, but I was out of town for an interview.

Here's my take on Star Wars: Galaxies's crafting system and why it was great:

First, no two items were perfectly alike. Even if several crafters capped one of an item's stats at its highest value, the other values varied depending on what resources went into it and what else the crafter chose to experiment on.

Second, you don't have to use the exact same resources to craft an item every time. Some recipes allowed for variation; for example, a recipe might require 50 units of Diatum Copper, but another recipe could only require 50 units of Metal. While the first recipe would only take Diatum Copper in that slot, the second recipe could take any kind of Metal.

Third, it was possible to craft while offline. If you created a Manufacturing Schematic of an item and had a sufficient number of resources, you could plug all that into a factory and let it cook while you did other things. In this way it was possible to be producing a large number items for sale, allowing for mass produced items as well as special orders.

Fourth, if you were good enough, people came back to you and sang your praises. On my server, Chilastra, everyone who did any kind of combat knew the name Stettin - he was a famously good weaponsmith who produced excellent weapons in a short amount of time for reasonable prices. This kind of "hero crafter" status was common to all servers that I played on; there was a handful of crafters that everyone knew to go to for the best deals. This was made possible by the unique setup of the crafting mechanics.

Finally, you didn't have to be a hardcore player to enjoy crafting. If you didn't want to make the ultimate best plasma flamethrower to compete with Crafter X's goods, you didn't have to. You could casually craft things for your friends or guildmates. Some of these things would naturally be lower quality, but you had that option.

If I had to use two words to describe the SWG crafting system, I'd say it was versatile and very freeform. I'd like to see that strategy taken with future MMORPG crafting systems.