When it comes to the trade house side of things, I generally view profits in terms of xp rather than fang, but there is a significant difference when it comes to general goods as to whether they get left in a crafting station/trashcan or actually worth hauling.
I take 500 fang of deer pelt (at Petre value) into the craft house, turn it into ~350 fang of bags/boots, and the gap is covered by XP. This is fine. Total profit of maybe 300 fang after tannin etc. Whole process takes one in-game day from a 6am start to collect, process, and cash in. This is doable on a brand new crafter, with less fang initially, and increasing as levels are gained. Alternatively I have other characters I can sell these pelts to for 1000 fang and still have the entire IG afternoon to go adventuring with others. This doesn't improve my skills, but someone else can have fun counting out 50 tannin from the merchant while I'm RPing and doing things.
Woodworking is not so lucky. A full day of gathering beech, crafting small crates (for higher trade house value) and maxing out an ox (~80 crates at walking pace) plus carrying a few yourself (maybe 15 if travelling light) comes in about 280 fang, minus 20 fang for the ox and you've spent 24+ game hours for 260 fang. As for pushing those resources to another player? I'm yet to see anyone use beech for anything other than crate spam and dump, with the norm generally being set up a sawhorse next to the tree spawn and just stop by every so often to craft a million shafts and leave them there. If it had an applicable use to other players (storage box recipe? 1lb for beech 0.5lb for oak? no weight reduction) or better value as a crate at tradehouse there might be less wastage left around (in containers, but still, trees are getting cut down for absolutely zero value which should make most friends of the forest incredibly angsty).
By all means I take people along when I can to gather resources, but during low pop times no ones around, and during high pop everyone wants to go dungeoning. I can squeeze a pelt round into the daily routine but woodworking generally consumes so much time with both gathering and crafting. When asking traders/crafters about whether I can gather resources (raw or processed) for them for coin, the general response thus far has been sod off/no thanks I do it all myself. There's not enough value in a low level resource like beech to incentivize new characters to gather for crafters (that is, no reason for a crafter to pay, other than grinding). Similarly, no one seems to want to collect any form of metal shy of steel for me, making it very hard to learn a lot of woodworking recipes. Copper/bronze/iron seem to be in little to no demand for early crafters, and skilled crafters won't give it the time of day. When you can buy gilded steel weapons for 500 fang, why bother with anything less.
This is all however, irrelevant to my original point. Tradehouse/resource value isn't what I'm here to discuss. (Although it would be nice if they bought bows)
I want to be able to say as a skilled/well equipped craftsman I am more efficient than the average joe of my craft, not just on success of difficult tasks, but quickness in mundane ones. As someone who works in the electrical industry you can see a clear difference in both work speed and reliability of a tradesperson compared to their apprentice. This is due to both experience with the job, and the knowledge of choosing the best tool for the job. As part of pre-voc a student is required to fulfill their assignments using hand tools alone, with the idea being it gives them a better understanding of the task, and an appreciation for more efficient tools available. If this were reflected within the game, it would make perfect sense. I'm not saying we chuck a CNC machine in the forge, but my $30 automatic wire strippers work about 20x faster and better than a $5 standard pair an apprentice starts with.
Preparation skills will always be higher than assembly skills as well, due to failures not carrying any xp over to assembly. Is it something to consider then for these skills alone? It would seem fair enough to me that cutting wood/skinning pelts would benefit more from muscle memory than assembly would, and the speed of these skills would increase over time. While assembling an item would require more attention to detail on an individual basis. My skinning is currently about 5 levels above my leatherworking, the same is true for carpentry compared to woodworking. I would like to think if I have that much more experience in those areas I might be a bit faster at it. If skilled preparation became a faster task than assembly then there might be more preparers out there willing to sell to people who purely want to assemble.
If processing base materials had a faster alternative (even if only at higher level) we might see more people focus solely on skinning/carpentry/smelting and merchanting those goods to others who focus solely on woodwork/leatherwork/smithing. As it stands the only merchants I see are selling finished items (majority potions & tonics, followed by arrows. Presumably by their temporary nature and constant demand. Herb bags/flasks do wonders to make those crafts easier as well). And those who craft permanent goods, are typically on demand only, or carry a finite range of high end with them.
Bit of a rant below, feel free to ignore.
I have about 16,000 arrows in my bags as a result of people going "here I'm grinding smithing, everything else would just get trashed/vendored anyway, have a bunch of arrowheads". Which is partly fine because woodworking xp for me, but damn this is going to take me forever to burn through, and the copper arrows are all going to go to waste because of the lack of fey. If the level of manufacture and dump that happens on the server occurred in reality the greenies would be protesting in the streets.
Also as a side note about P2P things, leather bags are somewhat redundant? Equivalent to a storage box that can be bought for 15? fang from an NPC, and trade houses for 10. If they were adjusted to weigh 0.5lb they might find a p2p value of between storage box and 250 fang (vaasti satchel from npc), otherwise they have no purpose other than trade house & xp. Crates and barrels at least are used by merchants on occasion to display goods.
As it stands I feel a lot of the incentive to grind is "doing it for the xp so i can use better materials to make better stuff" which I feel opposes the server focus of RP. By sending fur boots to the tradehouse I at least get to feel like they're getting put to use by the people of vallaki instead of sitting in a trash can. A set of "trade goods" such as bags, fence posts/wooden beams, etc (one thing for each assembly skill, perhaps) that is always accepted at the tradehouse (or regularly high demand, they do send shipments elsewhere!) and has a reusable pattern would at least help to maintain immersion when approaching the grind.
