This is pretty much the on going issue with the different opinions on balance for each play style. The two main play styles of the game are crafting builders who build a base and mine and make most of their gear themselves, vs the ADHD run and gun kids that spend 98.9% of their time looting PoI and don't want to ever have to mine or craft. Of course there's a bit of overlap, but that overlap is just in the form of "I loot PoI to get my loot and build a base" but very few in A18 do crafters that loot, for obvious reasons.
They didn't want to lock all the good gear behind crafting, because the ADHD kids can't mine for materials and would have to spend their precious perk points on crafting skills instead of MOAR DAMAGE. So they added schematics to the game and made it so you can only get level 6 gear via traders or loot. Which kind of craps on crafting play styles because any points put into crafting perks are wasted as you can just find a schematic instead to do the same thing. None of the crafting perks "Side bonus" are worth a perk point on their own, like 20% faster forge speed etc is just not a good perk because you can build a second forge and get double forge speed instead
Currently in A18 crafting builds are a dead meme, even as someone who has played a crafting builder focused character since like A14, there's essentially no way to craft gear in A18 faster than you could just find it. By the time you've invested all the bajillion perks needed to make a crucible and learn to make high tier steel armor etc, you would absolutely have had it 400 times faster by just playing a looter character.
ATM, level 6 gear is kind of the place holder for "Legendary" items that aren't in the game yet, so they want to make those loot / trader only, but it pretty heavily cripples you because your last mod slot is locked behind your items being level 6, and levels on items basically don't do anything at all if you don't have mods for them
A19 overhauls the skills to some degree and consolidates stuff, but we don't know any real details yet as they haven't showed the new skill trees. It seems like the focus was mainly on consolidating bad perks to make them more tempting and lowering the total amount of perks needed to max out perks that were basically only worth it at max rank like the Jump perk.
A19 will also help with the loot age changes so you aren't decked out in full steel armor with a full set of steel tools by day 9, which might give a crafting character some tiny chance of keeping up
I'm hopeful on the crafting perks being overhauled to at least be worth picking if you already have the schematic / aren't auto "Respec" tier where you have to drink a respec potion to get your perk points back after you find a schematic, like with all of the vehicle perks. If the perks were actually decent on their own it would help to close the gap between the two play styles where one isn't basically punished for looting until you get the schematics instead.
