Like it or not PVP makes crafting actually useful.
Look at games where there is no pvp and no loss for death in PVP, crafting is practicaly useless.
You craft it once and there is never a need for it again since you can't lose it. sure there is loss through durability, but the rate at which that happens is usually very slow and would still make it pointless.
For crafting, and rescource gathering to really be useful there has to be destruction, there needs to be some way that these items are being lost quickly so that the economy isn't stagnant.
As a crafter you should be begging for more pvp so that you can sell more armor/weapons to people who wear them out or lose them, and the more of a demand there is, the more profit you can make.
Especially in a game with a softcap on skills, fighters are not going to be using their skill allowance on crafting, which means that crafters will be needed.