All suits contain of at least a handful of crafted items. Most people run around with a crafted-only suit or a suit built around a handful of arties or legendaries. So I highly doubt, that crafters have no content to play with.
Try go farming a suit just made out of legendaries with no crafted gear. You'll farm years if you manage to archive it at all to get a full clean leg suit. Even if you make compromises and use the cursed/antique/etc. stuff, you'll farm weeks until you get a half balanced suit.
Less demand of crafters over the years has completely different reasons. The two most prominent being insurance & PoF. Which is also understandable from a certain point of view, because noone wants to loose high-end pieces. So basically you can blame AoS for introducing item properties. But without item properties there wouldn't be imbuing or reforging on the other hand. There's always a tradeoff.
In my opinion, if you really want to fix it, you have to go the complete opposite direction:
- REDUCE max property cound on items:
- Magic items can have 1 (yes, just one) item property.
- Legendaries can have 2.
- Arties would need some rework. Probably also just 2, not really fond of a third. Those should probably be the items, which get properties, which aren't available for that certain item type. I.e SSI on armor etc...
- Adapt imbuing as well
- Legendary crafters should be able to add a single item property.
- There should be only a slim chance of adding a second property. You shouldn't be able to retry such an attempt. Add maybe some consumables from BoD rewards, which can increase the chance.
- Reforging would need an overhaul. No idea here at the moment.
- REMOVE PoF as a whole. (Or maybe just change it to be a temporary buff for an item, which then would loose durability at a slower rate.)
- REMOVE insurance. (including bless deeds and already blessed items). There. I said it. I'm expection a mob with pitchforks & torches showing up at my doorstep.
- Make all items start with 250 max. durability & change how repair works:
- An item repaired by a legendary crafter should loose 10 max. durability. Can be repaired 25 times.
- Less proficient crafters will get an increased penalty. No idea, i.e. -20 max. durabilty at GM.
I'm pretty sure I forgot some things, which would need adjustment because of that as well.
And yes, those changes would be rather extreme. The endgame would change dramatically. Soloing content would probably not be possible anymore.
Also those changes would be quite time consuming to implement. So they never won't happen anyway. Plus, we would have to somehow get rid of all those 5+ items, which flood the system right now.
But that's how I imagine, would improve the whole game. Not just improve the situation for crafters. Because properties would mean something. You can't wear a god-suit anymore, which has all the properties. You'd have to make decisions, whether you go defensive or offensive. Tanky or glass cannon. Or something in between.
Plus people would learn to loose items again. Wether because they can't recover the corpse or an item has worn out. Just like in the golden years