I know I'm jumping in late, but I have been collecting data on the "exciting new things". Getting the facts straight before talking if you wish.
1) Scrap realism. Becoming a true master in any craft takes a decade or two in real life.
2) Maximize fun. Maxing anything is utterly boring at this time, and forces players who want to play a good smith into months of mind-dumbing repetitive tasks. (Same goes for excellent fighters or mages.)
3) Training is a solo thing. This is a multiplayer game, so the time spent for training is lost time to interact with other players.
Then there are the things specific to crafting:
A) Shortening the heating times was irrelevant. You can always heat while hammering. (Not too unrealistic, too.)
B) Shortening the hammering times for some intermediate steps is helpful, but it was just a 20% decrease for a full cycle. While it's nice to train faster by 20%, it doesn't change much for the basic problems.
C) As has been said before, initial quality is irrelevant. Let's say the quality of an intermediate stage if determined by the previous stage's quality at 40%, the crafter's skill at 40%, and by chance at 20% (just inventing some numbers here, the real numbers are different but not too far off). Just for the delta blade after two steps, the initial quality is down to a relevance of 6.4%. The final blade is still several steps ahead, drowning out the initial quality to irrelevance.
D) The random factors are far too high. If the chance of mucking up your blade at any stage are 10%, this means you have a 90% change of success (or at least not losing your work). Making a blade is five(?) steps that influence quality, so which means you have a chance of 0.9^5=0.59=59% of getting through without fouling up.
Fouling up isn't the end of the world as you can take a fouled-up blade and rehammer it, but it's still not fun. Particularly since you have to spend two minutes just to heat up the darned mistake and hammer it back to something that has a mere chance of becoming something useful.
The random factors also totally swamp out the difference between a level and the next. At one time, an increase of one level in blacksmithing and axemaking would increase the average end result's quality by 10, but you don't notice that if the random factors make the blades vary by 50 points. So increasing a crafting skill denies people the positive feedback of having achieved something - it's not unusual to make 10 blades at a new level and find that the average quality dropped by 10 (happened to me more than once, though the level after that would then usually give me a plus of 30, re-establishing the +10 per level overall).
E) I see shield making being compared to weapon crafting. I thing that's grotesquely wrong; you should really compare it with metallurgy training.
There, I can juggle twelve of sixteen ingots at a time, and gain another point of skill as quickly as I can move an ingot from furnace to stock casting and vice versa. It's mind-numbing, it's giving you RSI, but after a few weeks of grind, you have it.
That was just the right level of a barrier: more than you'd like, but not so much that you regret having done it after you're over with it.
If shield making is worse than weapon crafting, then shield making is far too difficult by at least an order of magnitude.
IMHO and YMMV etc.
/me steps down from his soap box, bows and vanishes in the crowd.
