Both Biochem and Artifing are very useful. With Artificing I upgrade my lightsaber to almost 40% better damage and stats than anything you can buy with commendations. Plus, I can make my shield generators and enhancement mods for armor.
I have mixed feelings. I see your point and have encountered it at times, but I have also crafted many items while leveling that are FAR better than any drop or quest reward.
The crafting/gathering is still too quick overall for my tastes, but I prefer a bit more grind to my games. I'm already 400 Slicing, and 250+ in my other two skills in three days. I'll be capped in all before long.
Reverse engineer the appropriate level hilts until you get the blue recipe. Do it on those until you get the purple. Then craft a lightsaber hilt that does FAR more damage than any quest drop at the same level.
We already have a failed launch. multi-hour queues on servers where guilds were pre-deployed is a failure. Constant DCs to get stuck at the end of those queues is a failure.
I have missions turning grey on a planet before I am done with them. And that's with only having run 1 flashpoint and no PvP. I have done everything in a duo and all the space missions, which does increase XP a bit.
Because Bioware deployed the guilds. Bioware did a stupid staggered early access to manage new server rollout. Bioware didn't implement a DC grace period. Pretty much everything involved with this problem is in Bioware's control.
Lots of games have had it.
SWTOR already does it sometimes. My partner and I got disconnected during one of his story quest instances and got places 1 and 2 in the queue. In the open world, we were put to the back of the 45 minute line.