Crafting killed the grind, it had most people only play long enough to get the weapons crafted then they stopped playing till the next season. Personally I get why they removed it if people aren't playing then they aren't as likely to buy crap from eververse. Plus if you've already got the best weapons from crafting why preorder the next expansion, why grind the new stuff. When your old crap is still outperforming the new stuff in every way there's no reason to care. So the tier system was made to make crafting obsolete plain and simple.