jadzia, i agree with you in concept, where 'higher level skill means something'...however in practice this really just promotes macroing. Any system that promotes grind or tedium over player driven intereaction is vulnerable in that manner.

Personally, i think that specializing in skills (ie. like individual recipes, or classes of recipes) in conjunction with a fairly rapid, if inversely exponential, skill decay (ie. the higher the skill, the faster it decays, with decay slowing down rapidly as you got towards the middle of the curve) would do fit the compromise. Adding to this system the ability for players to unlock potentially unique recipes based upon certain their levels of craftsmanship...something like 95 broad ax + 85 super duper shovel + 100 long handle = Long Handled Bladed Shovel (uh weaponized spear/shovel hybrid that gives bonus to earth moving dig speek). witht he faster skill decay, it would be all but impossible for a non-dedicated (ACTIVE...not bot) crafter to achieve the higher end variants.

of course this would only work with a much higher level crafting specialization (discussed in a previous thread somewhere) than we currently have.