I received this thought after the introduction of bards being able to create weapons and the proposal from Morlhach that all classes will eventually have this.
Why not make a skill for every class as a selectable.
Only one selection can be made per character.
This selection will allow the character to be able to create an item.
Character A has chosen the selectable to build leggings. These leggings can be made many different ways with a limited amount of options. To the creator, they can make a better pair than they can give to anyone else, but it is owner only. However, the creator can trade and sell some of his creations, yet they will not be able to achieve maximum strength. This would allow the entire game to focus on a selecting something.
Say character X has trouble finding equipment for slot Y, so they can specialize in that slot with their selection and build their equipment how they see fit. It also opens up the material farming to the entire game and allows more interaction with Merchants. More flow of gold. More rp.
I like the concept of opening material usage to everyone, but I don't think this is the best method of doing that.
I thought it would be interesting to make it so that druids could make use of the various trees when creating their druid staffs to perhaps leverage some sort of variance in the quality or effects that the druid staffs might offer(some woods more damaging, some woods giving better stat boosts and whatnot).
And for metals(And I may have seen a similar post somewhere else so this might not be an original thought) I thought it would be an interesting dwarf/duergar racial in that they could harness the various metals that they find to imbue their weapons with that metal thus being able to add mithril/iron/silver(not even sure if all of those are metals that can be found) to their weapons to take advantage of some vulns.
In either case I think that the addition of the minerals/wood to the game is a pretty cool one and I am excited to see where it goes.
I love the idea of a Tradesman, honestly though why not just make it a quest class and limit the amount of people who can have it like the others? They'd be able to make weapons and armor while learning skills that would add benefits to them along the way. Also as their skill raised up and they gain new skills they can add magical effects to the armor. Crafted armor that is good to wear would also be good for inexperienced players like myself that have no idea where to go for what and run around in black watch armor at pinn.