The first statement in this sentence disqualifies the second.

I don't care for the mod system myself but its entirely possible they could re-add a measure of classic crafting back in. The skill is there. The categories are there. They would just have to make some of the stuff relevant and add all new mats for people to use. It wouldn't have to replace the work they did adding the mod system. It would just supplement it.

Of course, I'd prefer the Foundry....

Modding items has at least nothing to do with crafting. There are a lot of games out there where you can
mod your gear, but they all also have a "real" crafting system, where you can craft armor, jewlery, food
and whatever else.

So personally i would say, CO has NO crafting system at all now.

I was under the impression that the new crafting system was to bring the game in line with other PWE games. I've never played any I should add. So it was less a Cryptic call than a PWE job.
Most of the original crafting requests were for the ability to craft level 40 blues, for purple gear (nemesis or Unity) to be made better than SL blues and more access to CTP components e.g. more places to farm r2 science components for example. It seems unlikely that Cryptic could have been oblivious to this and just hit on the idea of totally redoing crafting.

To me, there's one aspect of the new system that makes it a massive improvement about the old one:

Now I don't have to go on a whole new grind-spree if I respec my super-stats, I'll just swap mods and buy a few new secondaries from AH (or transfer from alts).

Agreed. For example Disablo has sockets which is probably the first example of this I can think of but it also had a weak crafting system with the Horadric Cube.

I find that a pretty weak reason myself. Cryptic is no more under the thumb of PWE than it was Atari. They made these decisions, they own them. That said it's likely they looked to PWE's other games that have succeeded with them and thought: why not, they succeeded, right? Without, of course, realising that it's an entirely different demographic of players.

Whilst I agree with the general points made through the thread about the non-existence of crafting within CO now, I have to disagree with this statement.

Cryptic are, IIRC, a wholly owned subsidiary of PWE. If PWE say jump, they have to get their boots off the floor. Atari may (or may not) have let them just get on with designing the game, but PWE may be taking a much more active role in directing what does and doesn't get changed within the game. They can do that, and whilst the higher-ups at Cryptic can argue with the decisions they can be told just to JFDI.

I've played Perfect World and Forsaken World a little, and they both have normal Crafting jobs, like Armorer,
Weaponsmith, Alchemist and whatever else .. so it doesn't has to do anything with that.

And that is why you shouldn't fight over anything I happen to post.
Is a cryptic rep allowed to say whether it was a PWE move or a Cryptic move I wonder?

When you have limited resources, you have to pick your battles. Throwing out the entire old crafting system was a poor choice. This is what happens when you have amateurs on the team making important decisions. Sure, every newbie dev wants to throw out the old stuff he doesn't understand and replace it with whatever he wants; it's fun to create all new systems, it's much more boring to polish and debug an old system that was made before you got there.

Since no one higher up on the ladder of decisions was able to recognize this amateur mistake, they wasted months on it and brought it to Live irreversibly. Losing senior team members every year and promoting newbies into positions of power is a great way for the game to go in circles and feel like it is perpetually stuck in a beta test.