Think about it this way. The gold standard for laziness in RPGs is the quest that asks you Collect 10/10 items or Kill 25/25 minions. This sort of design sends ripples through the game that makes everything banal in its wake. I need not remember how much Dragon Age: Inquisition would be improved if it outright cut all of such generic quests. That said, what are most Crafting systems but a massified way to introduce the constant need to collect a certain number of perfectly generic items in a way similar to those quests?
So while the idea isn't bad by itself, I think Crafting needs something more. It must reinforce the themes of the game you are playing. Otherwise its just pointless busywork.
Because first of all, let's face the fact that this isn't Minecraft. We aren't playing a game that centers around Crafting. The very act of Crafting some item is underwhelming by itself. You get a few components, you press a button and you get whatever it is you wanted. You can't built your own base the way you designed it as if its Heaven and Hearth.
What you can do in the best RPGs is build your own character the way you designed and see how the world reacts to that. Crafting is one competing element out of many, ranging from combat prowess to talky skills. Just building your character is the best 'Crafting' system an RPG can possibly focus on. So I'd say the answer to Crafting isn't something like Neverwinter Nights 2 did - which is to add complexity for its own sake - but rather to give it meaning in the greater scheme of things.
So, if you are playing a post-apocalyptic story of survival, then Crafting can be very interesting indeed. Provided there's some resource management involved. Even that Last of Us zombie game approached things that way.
Most RPGs aren't willing to do that. Which is only sensible, the genre is mostly about some form of dungeon delving and adventuring. And one look at the Elder Scrolls series shows how Crafting can break the game and remove the incentive to look for unique artifacts across the world.
But even if Crafting does not necessarily displace Looting, the precedence of the latter limits how much developers are willing to do with such a system. One way around it is to tie one with the other: Monster Hunter is mostly about killing giant varied monsters and taking their body parts to make yourself new weapons and armor that actually looks like it came off your prey. And that's really cool.
Another way to integrate Crafting is to make it a staple of the adventure. You make potions, weapons and food for the trip. This sort of thing can be seen in a variety of games from World of Warcraft to Pillars of Eternity. On MMOs, this can be justified as each player becomes part of an economic network. This is an important trait. Again, Crafting for its own sake is pointless busywork until it gains some greater meaning in the game. An upcoming sandbox MMOs like Albion seems centered around community driven crafting. Not everyone is going to be an adventurer, many will instead seek to become the greatest craftsman of a given specialization.
On Pillars, I felt, the Crafting system felt like a nearly cosmetic part of the game. Like finding traps, crafting is a secondary skill that people are free to use or not. Its not a dealbreaker in any adventure. Sure, the benefits are useful on something like the highest difficulty, but that's enemy stat bloat mode. In games such as Pillars, where the story and the characters you make are so focused on High Adventuring and killing orcses, I feel Crafting is best served by moments such as building the Flail of the Ages in Baldur's Gate 2. Or that spear in PoE's spider ruins which I can't recall much about.
Opposite to the way Pillars handled things I'd raise Arcanum. There, techie characters are all about finding blueprints and putting them to good use. Its a barely finished game where Magic easily outclasses technology but people still love playing with it because of the way it all integrates well with the awesome setting, the plot and due to how Crafting is an integral part of the character.
