You've been asking the wrong people. That should be the Vendeta armor that is all white at the end of the video. It's an IA only set which means you can't pass it to your companions later.

I'd say artifice would be better of the two because the items you can make seem more useful for the long run. You can always buy armor or get it from missions/ drops. The crystals and enhancements would be useful for you and your companions.

I'm also having difficulty gaining new schematics from reverse engineering. I'm at 400 skill and have made and RE'd at least 50 of a specific blue item in the last 2 days with no new purple schematics. I have also been trying to get some lower level greens to become blues but no luck there either. Something doesn't seem right, so I'm holding off any RE attempts for a while. Going through two stacks of tier 6 underworld metals with no benefit was a bit costly.

You can always check the market and see if any are available for sale. I prefer to be self-sufficient though. To quickly level up your skill send your sweatshop minions off on missions that have the shortest time and are yellow/orange while you are playing. This will help to increase the skill points you get in a gaming session. This method tends to result in having many crew gifts that you can either sell on the market or give to your poor sweatshop minions. Another thing I do is if a minion fails a mission I will bring them out and either /slap them or use the sith pureblood racial to remind them the price of failure. It may not increase their success rate, but it makes me feel better.

Character 4 wouldn't work because you can't take synthweaving and cybertech at the same time. Best to pick one armor style, either synthweaving or armormech to conserve resource gathering needed. I'd recommend armormech because it shares resources with cybertech so you would only need to max scavenging for basic stuff and underworld trading for the fancy stuff. If you really want synthweaving then change character 3 and drop biochem and friends to further consolidate your resource gathering requirements. You can always buy the good blue biochem items as needed as they are better in quality then the reusable purples.

If you have the collector's edition then you can get the light armor sold in the VIP area that looks like the armor the Sith troopers wear. It's black with some red on it. There is also some social armor that looks like it should be medium armor but all social armor is light.

Slicing missions are like sending your companions to a casino to make money. They normally come back with less money then they started with but sometimes they come back with double or triple the credits which is what people brag about. Slicing will not buy you a money bin for you to go swimming in like Scrooge McDuck anytime soon. It is possible to make a profit though it isn't as much as some claim.

I'm playing on a 47" 3D TV and it's glorious!

It does have a unique look to it even though that look is an engine in a cardboard box with the sides cut open to look like wings. I'm always afraid I'm going to bend one of the sides when I hit something or that it's going to fall apart when it gets wet. I do like the giant horn on the bottom and the tiny jet of fire that seems to be propelling the thing. None of the level 25 speeders really look that good though. Hopefully the next one we can craft will look better.

I was also looking for this vendor earlier. I hope he hasn't been removed perminately. Maybe another vendor sells the pre-order crystal now?

There is a merchant on both fleet stations hiding in one of the hallway corners that sells the pre order crystal for 10 credits. Set the map to "vendor" to quickly find them.