Good changes across the board.
One thing though. We tend to get a lot of currency & shop type inclusions, yet players consistently complain about the overabundance of shop-scape & the underrepresentation of production skills.
You’ve already added the ability to combine the celestial & signet ring yourself via production skills, so my question, why not add a smithing/crafting level requirement to forge the base celestial ring yourself, out of an amount of stardust (+ some other metal bars)?
The exact same concept & balancing, just let the player make it all themselves rather than trading an NPC. Or simply follow the same approach as the signet upgrade and offer a purchasable one for a slightly higher stardust cost vs making it yourself.
Skills like smithing, crafting, etc will never be useful if you never give them uses when the opportunity arises.
I do really like the thought of being able to craft certain rewards yourself. I guess one thing is that it would take away from the hype of getting a drop, and instead become a pre-determined grind instead where you have to spend X amount of time for Y resources, likely balanced around the expected drop rate. It would however remove some frustrations that arise when going "dry" on an item drop.
Is that a better change than the current system? I think there is definite potential for something like this though for sure.