And the ability to process said materials should be what the character specific tradeskills are. Skinning an animal? Baseline. Improving the quality of the skin? Baked into leatherworking (or whatever needs the gathered item).
We would have as baseline gathering skills:
Skinning, Mining, Herb Picking, fishing, cloth-gathering, meat-harvesting, wood-harvesting
Then as tradeskills:
Leatherworking, Inscription, blacksmithing, engineering, jewelcrafting, alchemy, tailoring, enchanting, woodworking, cooking.
Make cooking a full fledged REAL tradeskill, and create woodworking for player housing, and then with ten tradeskills, you could easily just take two of these, and EVERYONE could harvest materials. Things like staves could also transition into woodworking as well, which makes sense.
It’s a much more logical system, and the only negative I can see against it is folks that want to simply make more gold somehow by having less gathering players. I’d rather have a good system for playing, then a greedy system for encouraging token buying.