I have not had the case where I would get endgame Items like Steel Weapons crafted, before I looted/got them from quests. In my last playthrough I even went as far as only speccing into INT first, to get my workstations going faster by raising the chance for their books, as I knew I would get Tools and Weapons galore from quests before I could even get my crafting skill up.
By Day 10, I had all workstations incl. Crucibles, a motorcycle, a blue autoshotgun, blue M60, blue impactdriver, purple auger+chainsaw... yeah.. thats how crazy quests are.
The reward for quests needs to be tied to the biome the POI was done in - it makes no sense at all, that I can do a T5 infested quest (so a T4 POI) in the forest on day 6-7, that maybe takes me 10min to do and I get a blue autoshotgun from the quest, even tho the increased gamestage in the POI was still only 55 and I barely even get ferals... And I would get the same reward if I did this in the wasteland at GS 150+.... Thats the actual problem imho.
I would even go as far as saying, that the new magazine system actually keeps me from speccing into my weapon of choice early on - since normal bookshelves can also give me workstation/vehicle books, I would much rather spend my points in those perks, so I will raise their chance of dropping and progress faster in the things that I CANNOT loot, instead of lowering the chance to drop them by raising the chance of tool/weapon books - tools and weapons will come by themselves over time, workstations and vehicles dont.. So for me, it does the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do..