Frog staring into the middle distance because I tried the tool mastery crafts and they're completely impossible, so I ran them through that site that calculates macros, even though somehow I've never managed to make those work and I hate crafting macros with a passion just on a personality level way, and then I noticed that each job has a slightly different base craftsmanship/control/CP, which are only 20ish different but despite being really really good at manually crafting things within the Normal Range, the EX stuff fries my brain and I can't actually comprehend if that will affect anything so I need to run the macro thing on every single job or if I should possibly waste the food and potion to try them out and hope the tiny swings don't break the weird precise macros.
I hate EX crafting because I completely understand how to manually craft anything that's not an EX recipe and I have done all of cosmic exploration crafts manually, never mind making all the gear and tools and weapons for every job for 2 expansions. I KNOW how to craft normal stuff, and even difficult things like when the new endgame crafting gear recipes drop.
And then there's a skill difficulty above that, which has a ton of different buttons just for the jobs you have the crafter stones for, and every recipe is deliberately too hard to complete with any of the normal buttons, but also I have tried them over and over and can't figure out how to intuitively apply the expert abilities because they change the crafting minigame to a completely different flow, some of which seems completely counterintuitive. Is it based on luck or is it using these tools to force luck to behave??? I haaate it. It's never made sense to me and using macros for it doesn't feel like it's taming anything; it makes me scared that I've mechanised something I don't understand and I won't be able to handle any problems with it because I just don't understand what it's doing. Like if I suddenly decided to become a vibe-coder despite not knowing the first thing about code, and then someone asked me to explain how it worked.
I could macro the crafting rotation to make, for example, all the gear if I wanted because it's the same patterns over and over, but it's also easy to do myself and I can get sneaky fast-completes with the excellent procs from time to time and I like being in control to leap on those. If I was making it on the jobs I have crafter stones in I'd even sometimes use the buttons for emergency clutch moments for their seemingly limited but occasionally useful rescues if you've gone wrong somewhere and need more time/CP.
If I look at the list of abilities the macro site spits out for the CE expert recipes, a computer has min-maxed button presses for me and the 3 tool mastery craft quests have different numbers to reach for each one, and the site has come up with completely different start, middle and end approaches to reaching those numbers, so even if I study those, I won't learn anything really MEANINGFUL if I wanted to start crafting the expert crafts with my own brain, because I CAN'T physically run the numbers to work out the exact button presses to get to the answer in the most mathematically perfect way because that's not how brains work, and also, it's never going to be the same for either any other expert craft, OR someone sitting next to me who's melded differently or maybe even if just on a different job which has a tiny weeny craftsmanship/control base stats difference to mine.
I don't knowwww I'm a writer and humanities major, I literally haven't learned a single tool for instinctively understanding any of this in my life and it's so intimidating I don't even feel like I have the first foot on the rung of being able to knock these out even though it seems like everyone else hanging around the CE areas are completely confident and fine with both looking up macros and also just slamming these out.
