Droid Engineer Archive

I'm basing this question on the fact that Droid Engineer has been one of the most neglected professions in SWG since beta. And in almost half a year since live release, we've had3 noteworthy improvements/changes:

* Surgical Droids were changed to "talking" droids

* Droid Customization Kits were added as a BandAid fix for droid customization not working on droid deeds.

* Droid Experimentation was fixed 5 months after release, and STILL has no bearing on the final state of a droid once its tamed.

In contrast, professions like Creature Handler, Bounty Hunter and Commando have been given every conceivable improvement and fix that the devs could possibly come up with...supposedly for the sake of PvP balance.

If SOE ever releases a SWG2, should they even bother to include DE as a playable profession in that version of the game, or should they just go ahead and concentrate all their energy toward the "powergamer" end of the spectrum and just make all crafting professions NPC support avenues? Droids, houses, food, armor and weapons would simply be generated by the game itself on a series of different NPC vendors (or the bazaar itself), and the quality of these items would simply be dictated by your character's current level/HP/bonuses.

The reason I pose this question is because, since beta, most of the crafting professions (with the possible exception of Architect, Armorsmith and Weaponsmith) have pretty much had to sleep in the wet spot of the combat professions. Crafting inthis MMORPG has not been handled the way that even the devs themselves had originally intended...which has left many of our professions in such a bad state that a LOT ofplayers (crafters and combatants alike)are now asking, "Why is this in the game to begin with? It's useless!"

I have a feeling that when SWG2 comes around, we're going to see the entire game VERY streamlined, compared to the original SWG...and not in a way that may benefit someone wanting to play a purely crafting profession.

Of course all of this is purely speculative, but I simply base my assessment on what has come to pass thus far for the DE profession. Any feedback on this would be appreciated and enjoyed. What are you're opinions?