Apologies in advance if this turns into a wall of text.
I would love to see ranks removed from the raw farmed materials and a “mini”-crafting step introduced for each profession. I find it really frustrating that even after having the profession maxed we’re basically still knee-capped by the 1:2:1 ratio blizzard deemed “realistic”.
Following are some thoughts on how this “could” work
Skinning:
The Harvesting and Luring trees could remain exactly as they are.
Tanning: In this scenario, the skill points in the Tanning tree would be converted to no longer give skill toward skinning, but rather, toward a new process called “Refining”. I would re-format the tree to look like the Harvesting Tree with 4 nodes. The Primary node would give skill to everything in the tree, while the 3 sub-specializations would be specific for leather, scale/chitin and pelts/hide (i.e Thunderous Hides/Sunless Carapace). The new Primary node would be used to add 40-50 KP to the profession to bring it more in line with the other gathering professions total KP requirements. Skinning is currently maxed at 400 KP, While Herbalism and Mining are 560 KP and 500 KP, respectively.
Mining:
For Mining, we are going to re-introduce smelting, by re-allocating points from other trees and making some minor adjustments to the tree formats. Skill Points that used to apply to mining ore types would now go toward smelting them into bars for use by crafting professions.
Mastering the Mysterious - Since the ore gathered from these is no different from a standard node I’d remove the 10 KP from each sub-specialization, everything else would stay the same. (-40 KP)
Plethora of Ore/Mining Fundamentals - The idea is to combine these two trees by replacing the Plethora of Ore node with Mining Fundamentals node, giving Finesse instead of skill. The Mining Fundamentals node would then be re-formatted to be a 50 KP node with 3 sub-specs (one for each ore type). After that I would replace the sub-spec nodes skill per point with, probably, deftness per point. The “Refine Rank” nodes would be converted to allow miners to mine from Rich nodes for rank 1 and seams for rank 2. The skill ranks would be removed from each sub spec and the seams and rich deposit nodes would be removed. (-90 KP)
The Mining Fundamentals tree would then be replace by a Smelting Tree. Primary Node (40pt) gives +skill toward smelting and 3 sub-spec nodes (30) would give +skill for each ore type.
I think you’ve got the idea now so I’m gonna skip Herbalism.
I know I haven’t mentioned Enchanting at all, primarily, because in my opinion enchanting is already formulated in this manner. You have to “farm” your raw material, in this case an item to be disenchanted into your various profession materials (dust/shards and crystals) based on your profession skill.
Now for the wonky part, the new mini-crafting tree nodes are going to need node bonuses, and other than skill bonuses, I have no idea what would work here. These are not true crafting professions so I don’t wouldn’t want to introduce anything with resourcefulness, crafting speed, etc. I could potentially see non-skill based procs like the old alchemy procs for extra items or a Dragonflight Inspiration-like proc to increase the rank but nothing that is tied to an actual stat. The nodes would just give the “chance” of a proc, etc.