So what exactly was the purpose for only allowing one crafting skill? Do the developers not want a functioning economy? Are there galactic trade regulations limiting production? I honestly want a real answer, the economy is non-existent right now for any gathering/mission materials. Products of professions are mere side-grades or worse at end game. Credits are near worthless.

Don't bother even responding unless you are out of the honeymoon phase and have reached level 50. This game is really underhwelming there were a lot of promises of open world pvp and FFA pvp areas that when revealed looked interesting enough. But in reality nobody actually uses them due to poor game design on BWs part. Ilum is completely pointless offering zero actual reward for control and atleast on my server its empty or win traded for the valor buff. The FFA PvP area is a ghost town with no real rewards and even though it offers an AH there is no advantage and honestly is a disadvantaged place to even use one. As far as raiding and end game PvE the heroics are poorly tuned, the end game gear progression is not explained in anyway whatsoever. The end game PvE commendation system takes forever to get any gear and the crew skills requiring a drop from the final boss in the heroics and it being BoP is ridiculous. It gives crafters no advantage unless they actively PvE and the products they produce with the items are BoP also. The economy is severly lacking, there is no market for anything. Credits are terribly easy to farm and by level 50 you are easily sitting on 1 Mill+ with nothing to purchase even after all the speeder upgrades. Then there are the game breaking bugs, the constant crashes and clipping issues, the "space combat", the lack of major tools that every MMO coming out now should have such as a /roll function, LFG, server forums. Bioware really missed the mark on this game, they should have spent more time on a KOTOR 3 than making a theme park Star Wars WoW clone. This game really does not deserve the full asking price of 15$ a month subscription and should have been set up with an item mall and sold in portions like most other multiplayer games are doing. TLDR: This game was rushed and it really shows.

Are we supposed to be running the level 50 instances then move to hard modes? Or is it normal 50s -> normal raids -> hard modes/heroics. Also any explanation of the PvE gearing system whatsoever would be awesome. Tionese crystals, commendations? Locations, means of acquiring, etc.

The point of this post is obviously that this game lacks a lot of polish. Yes every game is getting patches and bug fixes and is never the perfect product, but the problem here is there are glaringly large problems that should have been caught in beta and are not resolved. The items not being sorted properly should be such a simple fix and makes a big difference in quality of play when you have to spend half an hour reading through the 12 different exactly the same armor types with names that don't show anything relating to what spec they are designed for. The clipping errors in this game are horrendous. I get stuck coming out of load screens into instances if I hit space bar too soon, constantly falling through the world or getting stuck beside crates. On top of that I've used storm in a duel fell through the world and crashed both my game and the person I was dueling's game at the same time. Really did people just sit and watch all the voice acting in beta because that is the only thing with any polishing.