With the current RNG nature of the RNG store and the items in it, and the RNG nature of upgrading weapons, and the way refinement will change that very little - we need to be able to upgrade a whole lot more weapons. Upgrading a weapon is a complete lottery in terms of perks and blessings, and it takes a long time to gather enough crafting materials to upgrade something all the way to orange. This makes it feel incredibly bad and punishing when the weapon ends up with bad properties and/or blessings. This cost also makes it feel bad to upgrade subpar rolled weapons, because you feel like you’re wasting precious resources on a weapon you will eventually throw out if/when a better one decides to appear in the store.
I therefore suggest dramatically increasing the drop rate of crafting materials in the maps. This will allow us to upgrade weapons and curious without feeling too bad about how they roll. Even more, it will let us experiment with different things without a day of grinding. Even better(!) it will let us upgrade sub-par weapons while we wait for better weapons, without feeling really crappy about it.
You have already said that changing the amount of crafting drops in maps is very easy, doesn’t require a server restart etc.
Even a quadrupling of the drops wouldn’t be too much, we’d still easily spend it all on upgrading things, not to mention re-rolling when refinement arrives.
This won’t fix your (planned) crafting system or the nature of the RNG store, but it would greatly help players in actually trying to upgrade items, not to mention it would show that you actually care about us having fun with this game.