Hey great post 
Few thoughts:
I think this is already the case, at least I’m noticing far more Acuity & knowledge rewards from the harder crafts (and those are the primary rewards of the entire system).
I don’t think the Patron orders are meant to be a profitable thing, clearly. I think they are meant to fulfill quests, do crafts, and spend gold to get more Acuity & knowledge. This is unlike player-to-player crafts where obviously the goal is to make gold. I think this delineation is helpful to the players, especially players on dead servers or when the expansion passes and people want to farm achievements for example.
I think the gold & rewards opinion may have some recency bias, mats are very expensive and as we normalize into the season(s) I think the patron orders will feel more balanced.
This is fair, I think there’s something to be said about seeing orders you can’t fulfill as something to work towards. A good middle ground is to just offer more filters, and offer some really easy crafts with more reagents fulfilled.
We’ve kinda’ had a copy-paste from what was in Dragonflight, I just don’t think guns/bracers/helm are “bis” for anyone so it’s less useful for sure… I think if we saw a resurgance of goggles being bis for PvP gear it would be neat (harkening back to TBC era gearing).
I pick engineering solely for all of the wormholes, it’s just so powerful and convenient to doing anything in the world(s). Having a wormhole to every zone and porting around saves a ton of time. I think this alone is very powerful for Engineers.
Being Toy and Mount creators is pretty fun, but it definitely has a short fuse… maybe engineer-only firework shows or something… more grand? Idk.
Agreed. Not to mention the mismatch between the crafting systems not finding reagents in our warband banks… Something Lenarius mentioned here.