Probably both! RE rates are definitely increasing as of the 1.2 release, however.

I thought about that myself, and the only reason I could come up with is some 'Tier 6' missions actually return grade 5 goods (companion gifts, specifically).

Companion not looting the node is ok, that leaves it usable to the next player. It's been my experience that the problem is the player character not looting. One reason for this is that there's no way to manually autoloot a node. I have 'automatic loot all' turned off, but if I see a corpse drop with a vendor trash-colored beam on it, I'll shift-rightclick to loot just that one body automatically. That doesn't work for resource nodes. Even if you have no companion out, shift-rightclicking just opens a loot box. When you're in the habit of running off as soon as your character kneels, it's really easy to accidentally leave an unlooted node behind. I've not done this for a while (that I know of), but I know when I was running through the lowbie areas, I'd sometimes be running back to turn in a quest, only to see a resource node or three with loot beams over them...whoops!

That's exactly what I mean, though - the game is paced (in terms of XP and cash gain) for a character that's neglecting crafting. In order to keep your crafted items up to date on your character, you'll have to stop playing the character. Just due to the amount of time it takes for your companions to run missions and craft items, and the likely return of RE schematics, if you play at the same time you craft, you'll outlevel the goods you can make for yourself. At least, any goods that are better than quest rewards and commendation items. That's been my experience over my first two characters to 50. I'd be more than happy to discover I'm wrong when levelling my next character post-1.2!

It'd be nice if this was shown on the local radar, like it is for your class trainer!

Like most games, you can't craft the best of the best for yourself as you level. IMO, this game is a little bit more difficult than most I've played to even do that for one of your alts. For self-crafting, the limit is the credits you'll blow through. You can work around this by sending credits from an end-game character, and keep a category or two of gear as the best of the best for your level, but not everything. The limits of both self-crafting and alt-crafting both come down to the research mechanic. You simply need time spent playing on the crafting character to make and decon the massive number of items you need to RE to get the purple. That's not bad at all at the lower levels, where in the course of running your dailies, you can probably research all the L7 purples you need for one character. Nearing the endgame, though, forget about it. I've been trying to get an L39 artifact-quality blue tanking crystal since the character that needs it was L35. She's L48 now, and I still don't have it. The 1.2 release will help - but we'll see by how much!

On my server, the T5/6 gemstone market seems pretty saturated. However, T3-4s sell for about 3500 apiece. You're not going to get rich doing it, but it can help supplement whatever else you're doing. At those returns, it might be worth waiting until you find a cheaper 'purchased' mission to run (a T4 mission on sale for 3500 will return something like 2-6 gemstones each worth that much). My usual routine when logging in my daily grinder is to log in, check the GTN for mission/mat deals quickly, then let my crafters exploit that while I run dailies or log to another char. It really depends on what your server's market is doing that day, though. Crafted purples still gain you more than the raw mats, but you need the purple recipes first...since you're up against a deadline, it's probably not worth the investment right now.

You're not likely to find something that's going to be less of a time commitment than running as many of the daily quests as you're able to get through. They get faster the more familiar you are with them, too. If you know the market, there's money to be made, but it's probably not less time than running the missions, and is certainly more variable in terms of return. I found moddable bracers on the AH the other day for 5k, sold them for 150k (more interested in fast turn than max profit), and made ~135k in a couple hours of waiting...but that's still less than I would've gotten running dailies. Look for cheap Treasure Hunting missions, run them, and sell the purple mats. Selling the raw mats should be about as profitable as finished goods, with faster turnaround. Running the missions can be done concurrently with questing, of course. Probably the best thing you can do is to minimize your cashflow out. Stop crafting entirely unless you're guaranteed a profit. Running T5-6 missions at 2-3k a pop adds up quickly.

Ah, I misunderstood what you meant about the 5 different implants. So yes indeed, 4%, or 1 in 25.

My favorite is when they're standing around where they usually are, but their clones are huddled around the workbench.

I actually really like Project, and I'm OK with Throw (though it looks like it should be an AoE attack). However, it would be a really nice touch if Project would only throw objects appropriate to the ground that you're standing on. They already have access to that information to play the correct footstep sound, after all! No droid carcasses in the forest, no hunks of rock on starships.

All else being equal, 20%. They can't really know that unless they're using the info that I heard has been/will be put on the tooltip on PTS, right? If that's the case, RE chance has been increased in 1.2, so the live decon rate may be lower. In any case, based on my own results, I'd be somewhat surprised if the decon success rate didn't rely on your skill level.

Decrease, not eliminate. The only way to eliminate the media access spikes would be to fit ALL the data files on a RAM disk. This is intended to move the ones: a) Most frequently accessed regardless of content played b) Actually written to (which can be slower than reading on some media) Personally, it seems to have decreased my load times by about 1/3. Where the loading bar used to be a slow, painful crawl all the way across, it's now slow and painful for the first and last third, and almost instant across the middle. There may be other bottlenecks on other systems. This is a solution to only one specific problem.

It won't increase sustained FPS. It'll decrease media access times, which shows up as hitching (temporary FPS drops as resources are loaded) and loadtimes.

Interesting! Supremacy is (+Critical, +Alacrity)...and Redoubt's missing decon is Alacrity. I wonder if what's 'missing' is that Redoubt can accidentally decon into Critical's Alacrity decon instead of its own.