I don't see how crafting and repairing enhance the non-combat experience of the game. Both crafting and repairing are pretty much only useful for combat.
It encourages actually reading the craft books, exploring the item creation for things like sneaking and pick pocketing and luck. Maybe even the dialogue stuff with +Persuasion gear.
That has nothing to do with what was criticized in this thread tbh.
That crafting works with recipes is good.
This thread is about the missing levels for crafting materials and especially about the missing blacksmithing ability that renders repairing pretty much pointless and makes it a chore without any benefit, especially in the manual way it is implemented in the game so far.
