Not completely pointless - once you get it, your chance of the next successful RE giving you the schematic you want increases It could also be used by Powertechs/Juggernauts (and assassins? Haven't played one yet) and their republic counterparts since their defensive mode provides a shield chance and absorption boost. I have no idea why they'd not just use a shield generator instead, but still... For others, wouldn't combining items with a boost to absorption rating and shield rating give you a small shield chance and absorb chance even without a shield generator or special modes? All of those are cases where you STILL wouldn't use it since you'd be better off with either a shield generator or a power generator, but...still...

If you were right, and even a low estimate of 10% of the people experiencing it comes here to post about it, you'd have a TON more people complaining about it. That alone proves that you are one of the 1 in a million cases. Personally, I've raised armormech, armstech and cybertech to the 350-370 range and artifice to about 260 or so, and while raising them I REd everything I made. I have had very few cases of getting less then 2 successfull REs out of the 10 items I make in each bracket of 20 (1-21, 21-41 etc etc), and quite a few cases of getting 3-4, including several cases of getting all 3 blue items from a single set of 5 greens. The same has held true when I've just REd stuff that I want/need without leveling from making the items, ...And then I've also had to try 20 times before I got the first blue earpiece. It's all down to luck, and when there are millions of streaks every day (assuming the above claim of 1 million players is correct - I haven't checked), these things WILL happen. It is possible to change to code to adjust future chances based on past results (Sid mentioned in a presentation that they did that for at least one of the Civ games) so that extreme cases like this doesn't happen, but just because BW hasn't done that, that doesn't mean the percentages given are wrong - rather the opposite, making that change would cause the percentage to be off.

You know you don't have to be on your ship to send out companions, right? It really doesn't take much time at all, and there's no reason to ever go to your ship just for crafting... It gives you the ability to train the skill by getting gifts, and gives everyone that took any type of mission skill the ability to gather them when needed without taking up a skill slot.

You have had some bad luck, while others have had great luck at the same time. I've had several cases where I got all 3 blue schematics from REing a single set of 5 greens, and streaks with 2-3 crits in the same group of 5. Being as unlucky as you guys have been is VERY rare, when there's several thousands of players doing the same thing, even the very rare things will happen to someone. For example, OP mentioned that he should had a 98.8% chance of getting an another blue schematic, which may be true (I didn't do the math myself), but that means there's a 1.2% chance that you won't. If we have, for example, 10 000 players, even only running one sample each, then statistics would indicate there should be 120 people in that sample that got the same result as you.