I'll just add that my criticism of the current design is that the loot stage ramps up the quality tier of loot too quickly and purple tier items are not rare enough. If I had control of the design plan, I would make it so traders never had anything higher than orange tier for sale unless we sold them our work and then it would only be until the next restock. Then we would buy gear in order to scrap them for parts to craft yellow, green, and blue.
Our loot stage would control what types of weapons we could find but the rarity of brown, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple would never change. Brown and orange should be common, with yellow uncommon, green rare, blue very rare, and purple ultra rare-- as in you might find 1-3 purple items total during a 100 day playthrough.
I very much agree with the design choice to make the very best tier a super rare treasure find via exploring and not craftable at all by the players. I think that currently blue and green tier items are much too common especially once gamestage/lootstage makes finding them less rare and this is what destroys the crafting game. If blue and green tier items were truly rare then the reason to craft them would be present more strongly in the game
