If I’m alone in this, I’m sorry. Here is my experience with professions so far.
Ask in trade chat for a craft, get a copy paste message from 5 bots simultaneously.
They all claim to be able to make any craft, just send to whatever character they put in the message and it gets filled quick.
Super convenient! It does however make it almost impossible to compete as a regular person just making stuff. Similar to selling mats, you just can’t beat the bots.
It also now just seems pointless to even have this system in place at all, it doesn’t promote interaction with other people or make the game more social. You don’t have the guild blacksmith, you just post the item in trade chat and get a name, a rank and a 3 - 5k tip request. I guess at the end of the day this isn’t a big problem, but it does just make the system feel like a waste of time. May as well just throw the crafts on a vendor and give them your mats. Its all just NPCs anyways.
I made a nice spreadsheet with names of my crafters and my quote. Also some standard questions and answers like for missing missives and/or embellishments. Even got a nice polite answer when the customer says no. And of course some funny parthing words I cooked for some items. My best is for rings IMO.
This is the reason I don’t craft anything that I can’t just sell in the AH. I don’t have any interest in racing against reply bots for work.
I feel like there should be a way to just integrate it into public work orders. First person to craft it while meeting the minimum quality requirement gets the commission.
But I do! I have two, actually - one does armor and the other does weapons.
I also have a guild Leatherworker and Jewelcrafter I send my stuff to. I’m the guild Scribe (I make everyone’s contracts, missives, and vantus runes).
We do most of our crafting via guild orders and discuss mats on Discord.
This sucks, and I have a toon on a separate server I have used trade chat to find crafters for. What I typically do is wait. I respond to the one who took a human amount of time to respond to me and does so with a clearly humanoid sentence like, “You still need the X made? I can make those,” or whatever.
If you get five in a row with bot names and the same wording in their response, you know. Just don’t reply to those.
I just don’t even care about it anymore… since Dragonflight… they need to revert back to the old system… Smooth/simple/easy… instead of this complicated system that takes too much to level/grind.
There are still a lot of filler fluff talents that need to go.
In my blacksmithing there is a talent node (Frameworks) where the first point is to learn a pattern i already know (Forged Framework) sure it’s the first point so it’s given when you unlock the node, but that still seems silly.