Recomb becoming base

First off I want to say how much I loved the game when I first started playing. I don't like ARPG's because the vast majority of them are shallow slot machines where your character reaches 95% of their potential strength in no time and then you spend hundreds of hours hoping for drops that will give you that last 5%. Some ARPG's even limit crafting and make any crafted item worse than what can naturally drop, exacerbating the problem.
Not PoE though. In PoE your builds have many 'problems'. Survivability is a consideration in this game where many others completely ignore it. You find cheap ways to solve these problems early and your damage is low. Slow you find more expensive ways to solve these problems, however, that allow you to increase your damage at the same time, or visa versa. The progression in this game is the first big win for it but not enough to convince me to play another ARPG to farm drop for hundreds of hours.

This is where the crafting in this game is incredible. It is very easy to deterministically craft the exact item you want. The systems require thought, planning and intelligence where the usual drop farming requires nothing. I enjoyed the crafting for the first time during Affliction, a league that it is very important to remember had no crafting mechanic attached to it. I crafted mid-high tier defensive gear as I was playing SRS at the time and didn't require a lot of harder to craft gear for damage due to how strong the newly added specters where. It was fun but I knew I wanted more. I studied the crafting and what gear builds wanted and tried to figure out how people were crafting it. It was a fun challenge to find the way someone selling and item on the trade site crafted it for less than they were selling it for.

Then it was Necropolis and we all recognise how that was disaster. For me, though, it was just the crafting. This league added a mechanic that was specifically made for people to get really good gear and this is where GGG made their first mistake. People weren't getting good gear from grave crafting at the start and they weren't happy. Of course, it was still cheaper than the base crafting mechanics, but most players have never engaged with any of the crafting mechanics in the way crafters do. So GGG buffed grave crafting and it became the easiest league to get gear. I played SSF and had a 3 tier 2 ele dmg bow at level 50 and quit right before I was going to craft BiS in SSF after less than a week. I would have hoped you would learn from this mistake.
Settlers is next and so is the recombinator. I didn't have much experience with the mechanic before the first buff and the affect of the recombinator wasn't really felt for a while because people didn't trust it. You could still craft gear for a reasonable price. Soon, however, people figured out how good the mechanic was when used properly. It didn't take long for the base crafting mechanics to become pointless again unless crafting near mirror worthy gear or above. Almost anything I wanted to craft I could buy for cheaper than anyone could craft it. Most players, apparently, didn't feel the affect and still think the recombinator is weak. I, however, noticed that anyway I could come up with to craft and item was never going to be cheaper than what I could buy it for.

I hate to make a distinction like this but smarter players had figured out how to abuse the mechanic whereas most players had not. I realised again that this was another league where I couldn't enjoy the in-depth crafting mechanics the game had to offer without getting to ultra endgame and I decided to try SSF again. Well would you believe the best way to craft the gear I wanted in SSF was still to use the recombinator. It was another drop slot machine, the exact thing I came to this game to avoid. I didn't know what to do. I decided to quit again and hope the next league would be better.
Then we didn't really get a new league. Then we got Phrecia and the recombinator was still there, and again the base crafting mechanics could not produce gear for cheaper than the recombinator.

Finally, the announcement for Secrets of the Atlas was here and I was so excited to see a new league with all of the Settlers stuff gone for good. I hear in the announcement you are keeping Kingsmarch and I pray that the recombinator is at least getting a change if not removed. You did change it. You gave it another option for crafting. Nothing to address how it was making basically all the other crafting mechanics irrelevant for the savvy player. I spent a while this league trying to find any item I could on the market for the top builds that was cheaper to craft. I couldn't really. Most of crafting processes cost more in meta mods alone. And now I find myself writing this post, wondering how I got here. I had watched streamers craft items that would have cost 10's of divines for basically nothing in Phrecia and now you wanted to make this mechanic standard? How did this game exist for so long with the main appeal being in-depth crafting and progression and you decide to add what is essentially a slot machine that is better than engaging with the mechanics for most players? Some people are still so clueless they think because they missed their first few recombs that the mechanic is useless. They want more buffs. GGG, learn from Necropolis and stop listening to the majority. They want what is easy, this game was not about that. You created these amazing systems not found in any other game and then gloss over them with an RNG mechanic that has no thought required besides using 1 base mechanic to get the initial mods. It's another drop farming device. Your amazing deterministic crafting, weaving multiple systems together, hours of planning for a single craft, THAT was what PoE had that other games didn't.

I write this as a plea. I want the game I started playing back. Maybe there's a huge audience you could attract if you gave them an easy way to gear their characters because they would usually struggle. Maybe you want to appeal to that audience. Maybe there is a huge audience of people disappoint with certain other ARPG's that are looking for a game and you want to grab them. Fine. As a profit driven company, that is fine. But if you care about the health of the game, for the sake of the game, investigate how the recombinator is being abused by smart players and how it is destroying the core crafting mechanics for the majority of crafts. Please realise how unhealthy this RNG crafting mechanic is for a game you have built around deterministic crafting. I hope next league will see some changes.