It seems like two straightforward changes would fix this into a reasonable flow.
1) Campaign Shells should be unbound. The current approach potentially leaves the market saturated with the orange non-crit results from crafting, so the availability wouldn't be a new problem.
2) Reverse Engineering a Campaign Shell should be 100% to learn the orange schematic.
That still leaves the cost of trying for crits, but opens the flow of Joe Raider removing augments, giving the shell to a crafter, and the crafter providing an augmented shell back once they're able to crit. Everybody wins, Joe gets an augment slot after some amount of time, the crafter invests in the mats required for the first crit, and they now have a pattern they can keep making.