I'm an artificer, and while it's a small annoyance, I'm kinda OK with it. What I do wish they did was leave the colors on the venders, but make the artificer versions have better stats, or give them some kind of augmented slot, making the crafted versions more desirable than vender sold.
Of Course, I wanted a similar system to SWG, where you had 2 crystals, one cosmetic (color only) and 1 for the actual stats.