You aremost likely correct (haven't tried it yet)
But it seems so counter intuitive...
PPL complain about crafting beeing not worth it and looting to op... but instead of simply lowering the costs they add more stuff that nobody asked for...
I was one of those people giving feedback to the crafting-looting-balance. I can't remember complaining in my thread or posts. Complaining is stupid anyway, since the game is still in alpha and thus everything could change at any moment, if TFP decides it isn't right as it is. Afterall we are just trying out different possibilities and give feedback on them. Of course there are people complaining, I'm not denying that. But to sum up multiple kinds of feedback as complaining, with primarily constructive feedback among it, doesn't make you look more constructive than them.
Especially if you started your first post with:"WHY PIMPS WHY???". Just saying.
But back to the topic:
IMHO just lowering the costs for crafting won't do much to the previous situation, since it's not just the mats that were making crafting worse than looting. In one of my games I have quality 4+ stuff from looting without lucky looter, while I can craft two (out of ~12 weapons, tools and armor I use). Just one of those two items I could craft is at quality 4, while I already have the other one on quality 6. So with materials lowered I could at best craft one item for my whole gear. Assuming the costs were as low as I get back from scrapping, lowering the costs would just lead to spam crafting in the hope for getting a slightly better item of the same quality.
Nobody with an intelligent resource management would do that, especially since the next lootbox could have a better item. It gets even worse the moment you find a decent quality 6 item, because then no crafting or even spam crafting could get you a better item. So not only wouldn't the problem be tackled, it would even allow for spam crafting to what you wrote:"Do you want spamcrafting back? Because that is how you get spamcrafting back."
Also low material costs enables groups to equip your whole group, so if everyone specs into different weapons, tools and gear, we are back to crafting only (assuming looting would get a nerf, so they actually aren't already fully geared up). With high material costs even a looting nerf would keep a balance on crafting and looting for groups.
Crafting always being subpar to looting, even at its highest level, leads to every slot being a lost crafting slot as soon as you get a decent quality 6 item. So if by "luck" you find those items early you are planning to specialize in, gear crafting you won't have any reason to craft any gear at all in that particular game. Crafted gear needs to be able to be competitive, to make any sense at all. It just needs to be expensive and include a risk similar to looting. That's kinda solved by needing a lot of materials you only get from looting.
All in all I'll have to disagree, the change TFP made, isn't something completely different than I thought of, but actually tends to go in the right direction.