I'm firmly in the camp agreeing with the OP. You can spin and defend it all you want, but there are major structural problems with how the crafting system was implemented. What the OP firmly hit on the head, as I am already seeing it broadly, is that most people as they progress towards 50 pretty much move to only using orange equipment and update the mods. Moreover, this orange equipment is easily obtained from sources other than crafting (drops, vendors, etc), and will not be replaced by most players very often (and by some, never). My take is the devs came up with an original crafting system sans modifiable orange armor, then later came up with the idea and forced it in without overhauling or even tweaking the originally-planned system. As a result, most of the functionality of the crafting skills are simply obsoleted except for the following two points: 1) Altering appearance - if someone desires to take a new look, they can buy another orange item and swap their mods. OP is correct in that this will not be very common (not enough I believe to establish a reasonable/profitable market) and it also somewhat turns crafts into appearance botiques ("hairdressers"), which is not very alluring. 2) Critted orange gear - if it actually is possible to crit orange gear to add an augment slot, which is not obtainable otherwise, these items will sell for ridiculous sums of money. Two issues I see already mentioned are 1) I have yet to see any of these exist in the wild and have only heard of them as being theoretical on the forums; 2) supposing they actually do exist, the extremely low chance of critting one does not make it viable as an actual craft really. I'm seeing progressively more people coming around to the realization that the only really useful output of the various crafting skills are mods, armoring, hilts, enhancements, and so on. Basically, the item modification section in the GTN for all intents and purposes. Of course, there are implants, relics, etc, but these don't seen broad enough to be profitable either. The narrow-focused topic of this thread (the utility of armormech/synthweaver) is frankly just a small part of what appears to be a large number of inherently structural problems with the crafting system and economy at large as designed. Just see the plethora of other threads on the total lack of utility/reason for crafting skills at lvl 50 due to PvP, PvE, and raid content, as well as currency-related issues caused by slicing. I was initially excited about the SWTOR crafting system, but have become disillusioned very quickly. It's pretty clear at this point the most effective approach to crew skills is to ignore crafting, develop and run an optimal rotation of high-yield slicing missions constantly, and just buy whatever you need. If there existed a crew skill that could create all the mod types, I would just go with that, as well as a strong majority of everyone else. No offense, but I believe most of the naysayers are simply deluding themselves of these problems at the moment.