I agree with this, but some recipes and tweaking would need to be done.

I think they should have recipes for a few of the basic tools, but those tools break very quickly wanting people to make the more durable tools (with the better recipes).

Mixed feelings on this one.

I've inspired all the master tools I need, which didn't happen overnight. Knowing that I can unlock them myself made me less dependent on schemes (believe me, I really tried trading for them. People just don't got these schemes). If my only chance to get them would have been through schemes, I might have grown bored of this game much earlier.
Those schemes are allready extremely valuable, because it takes extreme effort to unlæock the right one(s). Making them them the only way to unlock tools would make them ridiculously more valuable. I'd rather see other items becoming more useful/valuable, than things that allready are.

Scotch, I sorta agree with you but you are seeing an effect because of the cause. No one wants the schemes because of the ease they are to unlock them. Thus the recipes have no value so no one saves them. Even yourself when you scav you toss them out. Maybe not all of them but most of them. You are trying to say no one has them so making them unlocked through skilling is the only way, but because they are unlocked through skilling no one has the recipes.
It's a catch 22.
You also say about how you were less dependent from schemes right away, because like most people you skill up get about 800 or so recipes and fill in the few recipes left by either skill or schemes or a mix. Problem is that why would I save while scaving 1000s of recipes for someone like you to only want 10 to 15 of them? It's not worth my time to both even sorting them let alone worry about finding special ones. If people were forced to use schemes to unlock most of the tools (or armors/weapons/etc) then you would see most people would trade for them and they would be saved. Think of the blueprints. You can unlock them but they are pretty hard to unlock due to how the unlock system works with arch. So that forces people to trade, and blueprints are the highest traded item in the game, likely one of the only working trading systems in Xsyon.

Now where I have issue is the value of scavenging vs other gathering skills. Scav is by far the highest value resource gathering skill in the game, doing this would throw it even further off balance.

I disagree with this suggestion. Mainly because it would hurt player retention.

Currently the biggest reason to grinding a skill past 100 is to get the schemes you want. If you could easily get the schemes you want by trading, there would be less incentive to hang around.

To make this work, higher level schemes would have to drop much more frequently, which as DDT points out would make saving and sorting that much harder. Otherwise, there would only be a handful of characters (most probably inactive) that could make most master level items.

I almost never toss any scheme, and even with bins full of patterns probably could not come up with complete basic sets for most of the original leather armor types. I only have about a dozen master tool schemes and nearly all of those are untradeable - e.g. trappers leather roller, pioneers weaver, scrappers bone file.