No, they aren't. Or at least this behavior is not consistent. For instance, my slicing is maxed and I can do grade 6 missions but I am not level 49+. I also have definitely ran grade 2 diplo missions before hitting 17. I'm not entirely sure why the drop down menu up there is labelled that way since it doesn't appear to work that way. May be an artifact from early beta just like the modification benches. Most likely it corresponds to the item roll levels of things you can make with that grade of materials.

I agree with most of what you put here but I just want to clarify what you said about REing for higher level schematics. You may know this already but the way you wrote it could be misleading to others who don't know quite how it works. Doing it in stacks of 5 is actually irrelevant. All that happens here is you are getting 5 chances at getting the RE to succeed in unlocking the higher tier. The percent is the same. Obviously this means that the amount of items you RE is also irrelevant. There is no counter or anything. Sometimes you might get it with the first one and sometimes you might get it on the tenth. This is actually why I prefer to RE items one at a time instead of in stacks. Generally, the lower quality items are useless to me so it is a waste of resources to make 5 at once then break them down when you could have made them one at a time and, for example, gotten it on the 3rd RE.

A couple things. In beta, the Rich yield missions would always give purple craft materials. Unfortunately, they nerfed them shortly before release so that, yes, they now are quite a bit harder to get even with Rich yields. It's not just Diplomacy. Also, missions do have a cooldown of sorts and multiple companions can never be on the same mission at the same time. Once you use it in the list, it's "consumed" for a bit. Even if you cancel it, it won't necessarily cycle back into the list. And, third, as far as I know the Diplomacy missions aren't weighted in either direction and your mission lists just get populated somewhat randomly depending on your skill level. But I wouldn't worry too much about it because the morality shifts from them are pretty miniscule unless you're pumping out a lot of the high grade missions of one morality.

Because it won't. RIFT took this idea to the extreme and, in my opinion, it worked quite splendidly.

Wow, I really didn't think this would be such a hotly debated topic. It's rather clear already that the devs are encouraging of having freedom to fill multiple roles on one character. Respeccing being readily available with the scaling respec cost resetting weekly (with instance lockouts) clearly spells this out. The opposition to it boggles my mind, really. Just to be clear, we're talking about having two different talent tree specs within your current AC that you can switch between, yes? What exactly is the problem here besides making switching between roles easier? You can already just run to the skill mentor and pay a trivial fee to respec. This way you don't have to manually reassign all your points every time. And why exactly would you be opposed to being able to fill multiple roles if your group needs it?

You ever see that episode of 30 Rock where Liz is stuck on the plane and her boyfriend is the pilot? The whole "we'll be moving in 30 minutes" thing? Kind of reminds me of that.

If the source of these rumors are the same thing I've seen it is actually that there is a rare crafting component that is a white crystal which is used to make a color crystal that is actually Magenta.

No. I don't have or plan to get one for this but normally you have the link it to your account once you get it before you can use it.

It's a very short post. You should have read it.

If the delay is not by design it will probably never be consistent. In my case, it wasn't particularly long. Maybe 5-10 minutes?

There is a delay before the name is freed up. Keep trying. I reused a name during the beta and this happened.