TL;DR: Too many professions require Spark of Inspiration work orders to max out, when there is unlikely to ever be enough demand to supply all the orders needed for all crafters.
Currently, I am a scribe (Inscription). I do this for one reason: To make Vantus for my raid team, I don’t even bother selling any on the AH.
As such, my profession knowledge has gone into purely Vantus, and then I put points into Fauna runes as well just to help the team out more. And then to specialize, I took Archiving and got to Treatises to help other people get their profession knowledge.
Now, I’m at 65. And the only way I can skill up is an Off-Hand craft. With 10 knowledge points I could make an Agility staff…another 5 I can make an Intellect staff. Both of them require Sparks, and at minimum it’d be 12 crafts of those items to hit 100 Inscription, just so I can unlock my third specialization, just because I want the extra skill while crafting Vantus Runes to improve their quality.
In all my time in game, I have not seen a single work order for any of the inscription purples. Which, I’m not surprised about. There’s no real need for gear this week, so people are incentivized to hold onto their Sparks until Raid/M+ goes out to see what gear they end up needing.
But will raid/M+ really increase demand? I don’t think so. The normal purple BOP craft is 392 max ilvl. That’s the end of dungeon reward from a +10 key, or even just loot from Normal raid. Easily farmable. But maybe they want to farm up mats to get a mythic quality one, since that’s higher than any key award. Great. That means by the end of December, people might have 3 sparks that they are looking to fill in holes in their gear with.
But even then, that only helps if they want what YOU can make. And then, once those work orders come in…considering the sheer number one crafter needs to make, it’s STILL super unlikely the demand will beat the supply.
So now we have two problems. First, too few works orders for all the people who care to hit 100. Secondly, because these are the only options for skill up to unlock the third specialization to create more or better items, I imagine to most crafters, the commission on the item will be meaningless; people could probably put 1s as the commission, supply nothing but the absolute minimum mats required for the client, and crafters STILL would be fighting over them, because that commission is their only hope of improving the skill.
We need more options to raise our skill. Either more recipes that don’t require time-gated mats or crafting orders, or the recipes we do have need to provide skill for longer (even if it requires finishing reagants, that’s fine, just there needs to be something.)
It mildly amuses me that when I first heard about the new profession system, I thought Profession Knowledge would be the struggle. I didn’t actually think there’d be a world where it would be borderline impossible to max out your profession level.