New faction idea: Crafting faction

So, we all love the endless "COF or MG?" debates in General, but what if there were more things to argue over?

Enter the Crafting faction. It should let you craft up to purple affixes but cost dozens or hundreds of affix shards; add forging potential; increase shards yielded by Shattering; etc. Maybe the highest levels let you add affixes directly to items with Legendary Potential (again, for tons of shards per rank). Something like that.

Just as a new way to approach gearing up that's not as random, or as subject to inflation, I feel like it'd be neat to see. Crafting in this game is amazing, but also very limiting in some ways, so I'd love to see a way to expand on it, with costs in either drops (foregoing COF) or item access (foregoing MG).