I voted, but I wanted to respond too, because the way I play UO is NOT how I play other games with crafting.
In SWG, I spend 90% of my time on my crafters (domestics and munitions, chef and armorsmith specifically), getting supplies for my crafters, hunting creature resources for my crafters, scouting resource spots for my crafters, stocking my vendors, emailing customers, working on custom orders, kicking my factories, reading crafting boards. Crafting in SWG is essential to gameplay, and there's no way for every player to have every craft without several costly accounts and literally more time than there is in a week to actually run all of those traders, since they simply take so much time. A single high-end crafter is at least a part-time job, I am not kidding. They're compensated very well for that time; being a high-end crafter takes several months of preparation but can bring you into the upper-class very quickly.
In UO, I have a main crafter with the usual set-up, and things like alchemy, inscription, and lumberjacking spread around to other characters. I use these characters very very rarely, to repair my gear, combine some arrows, etc. I would like to craft more, as it's in my nature, but the population is so weak and the demand so low due to everyone already having crafters of his own, that there's no point - there is very little market for most goods. I am not stating anything new to anyone here. But this is a fundamental flaw of UO post-insurance/post-runics, one that will need serious effort on the part of the devs to fix. Imbuing (and/or raising more craft skills to a 120 cap, sigh) will very likely make it worse, but it's hard to see how it could get significantly worse than it already is.
Personally, I find it very sad that UO, the original persistent world with a wonderful crafting system and brilliant player economy, is now lagging so far behind games like SWG, which several years ago effectively destroyed crafting in a similar manner to UO, realized the mistake, and began reimplementing it to the point that it's actually better now than when the game first launched. Worse, UO's lagging behind MMORPGs like EQ2 and even LOTRO, games which don't even consider crafting a critical part of their game and yet which still manage to create a more entertaining crafting system that has become vitally important to their game economies.