And how -- pray tell -- can a simple leather helmet or bracelet be crafted? How can you add attribute boni to rings?
Maintaining complex item categories and selecting random loot based on them is what smart loot tables do in a nutshell.
On the empty crates issue: Apart from the fact that your comment on my thinking processes is uncalled for, I'd still say it's perfectly OK to have some empty crates and to have the odd sometimes empty crate. But not thousands of them in the game. This uses up valuable gaming time and provides no fun in return at all. This is why I call it a bad feature for my money.
I didn't say merchants should sell everything, either. But skillbooks belong to character creation, not equipment. At least they should provide an exception.
Any non-unique item with a crafting bonus would already be too much IF crafting was able to further improve on items. But at the moment it is not, so no real issue there.
