It is good to hear all my comments were not in vain. I did not realise it is a single dev writing this, from what i have read so far it sounded like a small team. Much Kudos for his development skills.

Re the throwing crafted items away, that is one aspect I hate in any game. A possible solution could be as simple as setting up quest totems with repeatable quests that give XP boosts as rewards for crafted items.
Scatter them over the map, low level ones in founders isle, higher level ones in more dangerous places.
That would encourage exploration, and make baskets of tools valuable to a new players.