it's always been silly to have stuff in hunting or mining loot that is in direct competition with stuff that can be crafted since it lowers demand for crafting.
However, this is the way this game's been run since day 1 more or less. Hunters demanded the items in loot more at times when they wanted to save a buck or two on markup and not pay the crafters. I think that the L and sib stuff may have started as one fix to that, but that fix didn't last long since Mindark kept introducing more and more items, most of which went in to hunting loots.
Nowadays that the nanocubes and explosive crafting is happening so much the same folks that made those demands for more and more items in hunting loot daily complain on the forums that markup on things is gone and that the "economy is broken," when in fact the economy is no more broken than it ever has been, the crafters just aren't being forced to craft bull shit items that no one will ever buy, paying crazy markup on each component as they did in ancient days.
Requests have been made to increase demand in crafted goods for many, many, many years. Go read the wishlist section for a while. Requests have been made to make crafted items with looted equivalents better than the looted alternatives for many many years, but no one did anything about it, or they did something that completely went in the opposite direction (like creating sib, which no one really asked for before hand, creating L stuff, which no one really asked for much before hand, creating items that cannot be sold to other avatars or the tt so that they could have good stats or be freebies, which no one really asked for too much before hand - even if people have been asking for "better loots" forever, without really defining what they mean exactly too much). Request have been made to increase the demand of shops, which crafters usually end up running most of the time, vs the auction - more stuff that's fallen on deaf ears (ok, Mindark once admitted that a shop directory would be nice to do someday, but that it's one of the lowest things on their priority and "to do" list even though it keeps getting asked for over and over through the years)
Imho, any useful tool, weapon, etc. should be crafted so as to increase the demand for those items, and any components used to create those items should be found in loot. Problem is that isn't the direction that this game ever went. At one point in time it sort of started to happen with a cycle between miners and crafters, but even that is a bit broken now.
Don't expect people to craft stuff if they can't sell it after a few runs. For many, many years the loot managing team's needed to do something to fix the economy of the game, but every time they take any action they keep making it worse in some ways usually. It'd be nice if that trend stopped, but I wouldn't count on that happening ever since you are dealing with Mindark. Certain planet partners could start the process by eliminating some items from being used on their planets, but as soon as that happens expect a flood of complaints from those who own the unbalanced items, etc. You can't fix the problem from the bottom up. It's a problem that should have been fixed from the top down, but never has been, and probably never will be. That's why a lot of blueprints exist, but most of them are currently not much better than off-brand virtual toilet paper as they can and will tear your up ass up if you try to use them.
Some Planet Partners HAVE tried to help the problem a little by creating awesome crafted weapons, etc. However, Mindark kept those planets from getting far with their plans by littering every planet's crafting loots with "universal" i.e. Calypso crap in loot. If someone goes to a non-Calypso planet to craft they don't want thousands of Calypso blueprints or Welding Wire Blueprints showing up in their loot window, but that's what happens the way that things are set up today, right now. The 'fix' from the bottom up that the PPs tried didn't work since Mindark's balancing team didn't think about what they were doing and the consequences of those actions.
Maybe the move to put L items in the TT instead of UL is one possible start to reverse the trend.... but that won't work too well UNLESS Mindark makes it so each avatar can ONLY buy one of those L items from any TT in game before they have to start looking to crafted alternatives... once the L item from TT breaks, that's it, no more of that particular item can be purchased from TT... and all of those tt items will be soul bound so unable to be traded. No more TT version of whatever after you burned through that L item from the TT.
just like at one point in time you could only sweat so many times before that was it, you reached the cap.
After that you have to start looking to auction. It'd irritate quite a few folks if that happened. Hell, maybe even go a step or two further and make some of the other stuff in the TT go away too... make the implant inserter in the TT become L and be a crafted item. Remove probes and ammo from TT and make them crafted just like explosives are right now. People keep asking for more uses for blazers, novas, and sweat. There you go - ingredients for ammo and probes.
Edit:
Thinking about this a bit more... instead of removing ammo from TT, better option might be to change it so that blp and laser cells are crafted using one nanocube instead of the two that the explosives require.
That will make them a bit cheaper to craft, but they'll still be crafted.
