One of the great things about this game that set it apart from wow was having relevant endgame crafting. Removing the top tier from being craft-able completely ruins that. Being able to craft the 30s, while not useless, is no where near as useful as being able to do the 26s and 27s was. I geared up all my alts in 27s, the time and effort put into that was worth it. Took at least 4 months to get all the relevant patterns. With the 30s not even being the top gear, the mats being much harder to obtain, and the RE chance being halved why would i even bother crafting stuff for my alts?, might as well just run story mode ops and faceroll my way through. I dont mind gearing a toon or 2 through raid drops, but most of my alts will be abandoned now because there is no way im going to raid across enough of them to get them all geared up this way. This is a crappy change and in my opinion lowers the appeal of the game.
In my opinion they have gone too far with the changes. If they had just reduced the RE chance, and the mat drops but left in REing 72s, that would have been fine with me, a bit annoying considering how hard it was to learn some stuff at 20% (20 skill barrel 27s) I think that would have been sufficient to keep the crafting limited for a few months even with the REing of player made components. Or if they had removed the REing of player made mods and left the rest alone i could have eventually accepted that as well. Raiding isnt fun enough to keep me interested in playing for more than a month or 2 and i fear that I will not enjoy the game enough after 2.0 to keep playing for more than a few months, certainly not 4-6 months that seems to be the time between their raid releases