well first it was all blue not purple crafted gear , i just finally got the chest yesterday to crit purple after RE 46 blue chests .. that's a lot of mats man lol
and to keep up with mod gear being abler to change out so much, I'm a farmer and when it come to crafting, i have np spending 5-8h in a day getting all the mats i need to craft, on corellia iv got a spot that i call the gauntlet run lol, i pull 5 nods every 4mins /repeat, and will spend 5-8h doing that for a day .. even at lower lv i did this , the only thing i ever spent $$ on is crew skills and only on UT.
And even more now that I'm 50 and all my alt (lv 32 and lv 13 ) have there lv gear crit to purple waiting for them to get the lv to put on .. (guild help a lot with this)
its all in how u play i guess , I'm not a pvper and instead really enjoy working on all 3 of my crafters,
ps. when making alts and grinding up lv and not have to even thing about gear , you be amassed on how much $$ u have , think it was little over 300k fully trained at lv 22 .. /shrug