I agree with everything you have said in this post; I especially love your ideas on crafting. I would also like to see int he expansion the expansion of how many players can be in one instance of a game. They could have it that for anyone over the initial cap of I think 4 players per party and max it at 8 or 10 people the difficulty level of that game could increase by like 25%-30% but with this coupled with your drop rate idea could increase the drop rate of the "near impossible items" slightly. So it would be much much harder but the incentive to play with more people becomes viable again.
the one thing I must do now is buy legendary patterns since they say they are buffing the crafted ones with this patch :-D and hopefully weapons will not be ROFLCOPTER still for both crafted legendaries and crafted Yellows
I second this Amen
my Battle tag is: Wuylith#1410