A simple way to make crafting a more interesting skill path

I disagree. I love the shops and I think they make the game more fun so limiting them would make the game less fun - for me at least but I figure I am not alone in this. Besides, the good items usually come from drops and random findings so nerfing shops would do very little to make crafting better.

I think crafting just needs a better sorting system, cheaper recipies and better recipies along with special reagent bags or something to make sure they do not take up all your space. Either that or better drop rates so you can actually depend on it for stuff other than Fruitful Staff

 

You can do that by changing the shop rooms to be smaller (there's still a limit of 3 per floor), or manually decreasing the limit by modifying your version of the appropriate file ("tweakDB.ml"). Or by doing both.

 

I think in time the only hope for the crafting system is a separate inventory for crafting components that cannot be used by themselves. (Ingots and reagents.)

At this point mods make crafting much more useful. They can help, but there are only so many slots and it gets very painful to have 3/4 of your slots full of otherwise worthless stuff you lug around for the chance that you may get the last few parts you need to make something nice.

 

I think a far easier solution would be to just standardize the values of items a bit more. The problem isn't so much that good stuff spawns in shops, it's that some of the good stuff is insanely cheap.