I don’t agree that VT2’s crafting is better (nor provides more agency) than Darktide’s, and I’ve gone into that a lot elsewhere at length. The blessings situation is not ideal, and there’s a lot of justifiable frustration around not having the T4 version of each blessing and other wacky things like Flachette being seemingly harder to get than T3s/T4s. But there are several avenues for getting blessings, and ultimately I think they’re a somewhat-poorly-implemented attempt at creating reliable progression in the system. And then the locks…shame we can’t break them with cubes to make “perfect” 80% weapons.
But crafting materials translate directly to time. And at 10 hours or 1000 hours, I’d rather be stuck with enough materials for one upgrade/modification in Darktide (where you can at least choose exact perks or blessings, once you’ve acquired them) rather than VT2 (where everything is random outside of red weapon properties).
Another aspect to these two systems that I think gets overlooked is how in Darktide you will progressively gain more agency as you collect blessings. In VT2, every weapon (outside of reds) is random rolls over and over forever. And red weapons in VT2 are for long-time and top-level players…which I am very happy is not the case in DT. Even the weakest player can progress without having to do top-level content for a chance at earning something new.
My totally-unsubstantiated headcanon on this is that if they release everything in the files, whales will buy it all today and then FS will have nothing but negative growth to show on their reports for months to come!