This is fundamentally no different than requiring a minimum quality on public orders, which they’ve said they don’t want to do because public orders are there for lesser skilled crafters to get an opportunity to craft for people who don’t/shouldn’t really care about the item quality.
Let’s walk through an example of this. You post a rank 4 item up for recraft, hoping to get it at rank 5. Jimmy the casual crafter comes along, and he’s only able to do rank 3, he can never hit rank 5. What happens in this scenario? If Jimmy is unable to take the order, then you might as well have just put a rank 4 minimum on the order, which Blizzard has said doesn’t line up with their philosophy for crafting orders. Does Jimmy craft a rank 3 item and you magically get back rank 4? If that’s the case, then you could (in theory) get orders done only by people like Jimmy and you would waste time and gold while never getting the item quality you want.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The item quality of PvP items has literally 0 impact in any pvp situation whatsoever. Always. As long as it has the trophy of conquest on it, it will go to 489 whether it’s rank 1 or rank 5. Pvpers can (and should) use the public order system to get their crafts done for the price they want.
Just find a crafter in trade chat.
If you’re making the decision to play on a lower pop server for the benefits you gain from that, then you also have to deal with the drawbacks. Before the cross realm AH, you’d have higher prices on many items and limited quantity. My former mythic raiding guild was on a low pop server and the AH literally could not consistently supply us with mats for consumables. Some weeks our bank guy would buy out all the herbs for potions and it still wasn’t enough.
That being said, your other solution of joining a guild is also a way of socializing. With cross realm guilds coming in The War Within, that will be an easier prospect than ever. I’m hoping the cross realm guilds feature will mean cross realm crafting as well, since it would be weird to not be able to craft for a guildmate. Though who knows if they’ll extend it to personal orders.
Crafting can also be a cooperative endeavor. I’ve got ~60 bnet customers that I work hard to keep happy because they’re high(er) volume and easy to work with. They get generally cheaper crafting services and don’t have to go looking for a crafter, and I get a reliable income stream where I know they’re not going to make a fuss about setting the order to r4 min quality to save me some mettle or ghost me after going to buy mats on the AH.