Except you can't normally earn income with those, and when you do, it's at a significant penalty. The comparable are Lore and Performance - both of which have fewer external uses than crafting.
If crafting makes more money that all the other options, all other options becomes trap options.
Well you're supposed to be adventuring... when you can pick between the two.
What is the correct amount of downtime between adventures?
"Not breaking the game" isn't the only goal. If it was, they'd remove all the fiddly bits like feats and magic. The goal is to make all the reasonable options (like not being a crafter) about even in overall output. If crafting is demonstrably better at earning income, then balance has not been achieved.
Now I think you're being disinginuous - you know full well they didn't set those as goals. They decided they were acceptable costs for making sure they achieved balance in downtime options.
Once again: "Not breaking the game" isn't the only goal.
It will mean my non-crafter character has 20% fewer consumables - is it worthwhile to ensure that every character feels the need to take crafting so they have 20% more hp in their reserve pool?
But they can purchase more stuff, which adds up.
And game balance.
If they could do that in a balanced way, I agree that would be better.
But I categorically reject the idea that "Crafting should be better than Lore skills." I want downtime options to be balanced against each other. And more low-level items adds up, so just capping the strongest item you can make is only halfway balancing - and being balanced half the time is not really balanced.
Sorry but I can't be bothered to intersperse my comments into your quotes. This block quote will have to do.
The facts are:
1) crafting is incredibly slow even in the best of circumstances
2) the difference between crafting and other Earn Income tasks is therefore trivial, even if we would agree on the relative earning power of various skills. But discussing that puts far too much emphasis on something that has so little impact, so I won't do that.
I posit that these very modest aims were accomplished only by an incredibly over-engineered subsystem. Something much faster and easier could have accomplished the same thing. Especially when said thing is very close to zero in every campaign without repeated months of downtime!
"They decided they were acceptable costs for making sure they achieved balance in downtime options."
And I assert that these costs are ridiculously high.
There are lots of elephants in this room, but possibly the largest one is that item pricing is so exponential that even significant gains would only enable you to purchase an item one level higher, tops!
Let's take a concrete example, stretching credulity into absurdity:
Conan and Valeria are level 11 adventurers, now stuck in Hicksville, population 20. They must remain there
for a full year without any adventure in sight. They cannot simply leave, and there is no hope for these characters to find a bigger city. Conan impresses the villagers but still can't find more than level 1 Earn Income tasks. Even if we assume he critsucceeds his entire year, that's 3 sp a day, or 109,5 gold total. Valeria on the other hand is a Crafter and for some reason has access to everything she needs for a year of crafting. Assuming her rolls average out to the 8 gp listed for a level 11 Master, that's 2920 gold. That's twenty times as much! Valeria makes ~2800 more gold than Conan! Whee!
Except that a level 11 character is expected to find that amount in treasure (11500/4) just on that level alone! A level 11 item costs about 1200-1400 gold. And we reached these "heights" only by making
entirely preposterous assumptions! (From where did Valeria get her supplies? Why couldn't C&V just move to a bigger city? Heck, why couldn't Conan spend his time vacuuming the countryside - even Hicksville must have problems with kobolds and giant rats and other level 1 appropriate critters, and even a single level's worth of loot is 175 gold, more than his entire year's toil! And why is the campaign expecting you to take a regular 9-5 job? A year's worth of downtime is in itself nothing wrong, but aren't there arcane mysteries to uncover or quests to be completed "out of frame" during this time?)
A much more reasonable assumption would be that there's one month's downtime, and that Conan can find a task half his level. Valeria's gains relative to Conan in this instance amounts to 8-2=6x30=180 gp. Which is pocket change at this level. Even if we were to go completely overboard (according to your viewpoint) and say that Valeria could actually make 25% more money than the potential for her level, that would still amount to only 125% of 8 gp or 10 gp a day, or 300 gp for this month. This would not unbalance anything. Valeria is still only halfway done crafting even a single item of her own level! Even in a campaign featuring many years of downtime, you would never be able to actually break anything. You can't purchase an item above your level per definition, and gaining 25% extra low-level loot makes close to zero difference in a game where low-level anything makes no difference.
In other words, all the talk of "we must avoid PF1 imbalance" is making a mountain of a molehill. It completely fails to take into account all the other checks and balances put into the system, and the integrity (so to speak) of the level-based challenge is not under threat.
Next elephant:
"20% fewer consumables - is it worthwhile to ensure that every character feels the need to take crafting so they have 20% more hp in their reserve pool"
Consumables are vastly overpriced. Even if you were to spend all your looted money on healing potions, we're talking a pitiful amount. 20% more than a pitiful amount is correct, but still a pitiful amount. 20% of what Valeria just earned is 600 gold, which is enough for twelve Moderate Healing Potions, each giving back ~23 hp at a level where Valeria will have well in excess of 100 hit points. If she could craft a Major Healing Potion (which she can't) that would give ~47 healing which still is less than half her maximum. She's better off brewing level 1 potions and just drink them by the gallon, except she's even better off not bothering with consumable healing at all, and just take Medicine for her non-combat healing needs.
"I categorically reject the idea that "Crafting should be better than Lore skills."
I never said this. I was asking why something much simpler wouldn't accomplish the exact same goals, except possibly the "hide what Crafting actually does" one...
