[Felkesste]

I'm sorry if what I wrote last night came across as short, or personally targeted in any way, I was super sleepy and trying to hurry to bed.

This might seem unrelated, but have you ever tried to be "just a craftsman" before?
The first problem any dedicated crafter encounters is that the level cap on crafting skills. You, as an ordinary citizen who can't be expected to swing a sword, let alone face terrifying monsters with one, would level far slower than an adventurer. That's to be expected though, right? That's fine.
The second is sourcing your materials. You can't go plundering dungeons all day for things, so you'd probably need to buy raw materials from either NPC shops, or from adventurers- that makes sense, that's economics, and it could lead into a really healthy relationship of buying materials for cheap, and producing quality goods that can be sold back to those same adventurers for a pretty penny, right? The thing is, those adventurers can just keep the materials, and craft the same things for themselves, without paying for them. That's just the smarter choice for them. So they'll do that. Moreover, they have the wealth of materials, levels, and murai to mass-produce the same goods you could, even at your peak, and because it's all things they obtained for free, they can sell at a lower price than you, in bulk, and still be generating loads of profit. People would look at you and the prices you have to set just to break even after having paid for all your materials, and laugh.
So for practical purposes, there is no reason to be a craftsman. You should just be an adventurer.
That means everyone hoping to be noticed, make an impact, and have any degree of influence or appeal is going to be an adventurer.

Being max level isn't special or unique, it's expected of you. If you hope to have any kind of conflict with anyone or anything, and you're not level sixty and LE'd out the whizzle, then you're a jobber that's there to make other people look good. You get one-shot in fights, and have no impact on anything, and very little interaction with anything during confrontations or events.
Combat-oriented events are the norm though, because there's just not much room for other sorts of events. Cooking festivals? Well, how many people are dedicated cooks? How many people haven't been roleplaying as a hardened battle-hungry explorer, that wouldn't know the first thing about chopping carrots, let alone how to bring the greatest flavor out of them? Admins have limits on their time, patience, and attention, so if they're going to put time and energy into events, they'd want something that reaches as many people as possible, right? Since just about everyone's an adventurer waiting for a villain to fight and slay, introducing big baddies is just the go-to standard, the most sensible choice.

But by that same coin, there are SO MANY ADVENTURERS that are patiently waiting for their time to shine, that whenever a baddy does show up, everyone comes falling out of the sky, crawling out of the woodwork, and sprouting out of the ground, in the hopes of being the one to take them down and having their moment at long last. This crab bucket of enthusiasm and desperation only lets a handful of people actually get to be heroes, and the rest are just awkward spectators that might get to fight some henchmen.
There's not a lot of incentives to be anything other than an adventurer. No matter the flavor, warrior, mage, healer, rogue, you're a hobo that's good at killing things, one of many, many hobos, that some times roam in packs to rampage across stretches of wilderness, looting and killing as you go. You live your life waiting for that next glorious fight, but between an ever evolving meta of finding the most broken or exploitable builds to hammer down on until some balancing patches come out, and the huge line of fellow glory seekers waiting for their turn, you probably won't get your chance.

I'm not saying that the system is broke, yo.
I just want to see incentives to be things other than an adventurer. As it stands, adventurers do everything better than everyone else, and they get the lion's share of event and content. Idreamofadaywhenwecouldhaveacookingcontestevent. Studying up on the judge's favorite foods, going on journeys to acquire rare ingredients, sabotaging the dishes of our rivals, sparking mysteries and investigations about who ended up poisoning the judge with one of the competitor's dishes.. I'm not particularly married to this Coral Quill pitch, but I'm dead-set on a lot of what it has to offer being valuable additions to the game. A reason to roleplay as a scholar. Writing field reports. Conducting expeditions. Opening the door to people signing on as apprentices and trying to learn the ropes of being an academic. The Sigrogana aspect is an excuse for a lot of their core beliefs, neutrality, and curiosity, but the actual number of imperial members compared to Korvara members would probably start drifting hard towards island natives over time, because they're who's available to join, no more imperials would be showing up.

It's easy to say, "If it's IC, you should just do it, and not worry about the OOC practicality, or the mechanics of it-", but that's not how the minds of your fellow players work. A lot of people will choose the cheaper option of buying from an adventurer that can mass-produce things in bulk and sell for cheaper than you, than your barely-breaking-even prices and sparse inventory. A lot of people will prioritize reaching level sixty as soon as possible and getting the best gear as quick as they can, so that when the next big combat event does inevitably roll around, they're primed and ready to throw their hat into the ring for that evening's protagonist-lottery. The narrow scope of priorities this creates leaves the world feeling shallow, and at times, stagnant. People I used to play with for hours every day can't be bothered to play the game now even with Korvara having been released, because they feel like it's just more level grinding, more combat, more meta rat-races, they don't see a fresh start, they see a level reset that has the community lively and optimistic for a bit.
Being the change you want to see doesn't do much to change experienced gamer mind-sets.

For the record, for as doom-and-gloom as I may come off in that last bit, I don't expect special treatment here. If the masses are having fun, and it's just me and my circle of contacts that aren't, then that's on us. No one needs to cater to us and our tastes. I've presented a suggestion for a change I thought would be to the game's benefit, and now I've presented my thoughts and feeling that lead to that conclusion. If no one wants it, then no one wants it, and I'll shut my mouth. It's part of the reason I was hoping to spark more of a discussion about this, to hear how others see these patterns and their results. More perspective, and less echo-chamber effect.