While I'm currently not doing much in SWTOR other than playing my main with Alice which is very limited unfortunately due to different schedules. I have been able to still accomplish a good amount of things in the game by simply clicking on a few buttons and not even playing the game or moving maybe even 100 feet. That is due to the way Bioware implemented crafting skills into ToR, and I wanted to address this because I was in the crowd that had a problem with it until I really thougth about it, at least that was the case when I first heard about this system months ago.
The way crafting in SWTOR works is that there's three types of crew skills essentially, crafting crew skills are limited to one per (player) character, but then you can also have whatever combination of gathering and mission skills that you want, be it two gathering, two mission, or one of each. While gathering and crafting is pretty much standard fare for most MMORPGs (you gather stuff with like mining for example, and then use those materials to craft into things with black smithing) the mission skills basically entirely justifies the crew skill system as it produces things that aren't found anywhere in the world, and the only way to get them is to send your companion characters on missions where they're rewarded on completion of the mission, a certain amount of that special material. Sending companions off isn't only tied to mission skills however, this is where the crew in crew skills comes into place.
With crew skills you can basically do everything with companions without moving an inch yourself, in fact the only real thing you can do on your own is gathering skills, if you have a required skill there are nodes or defeated enemies that you can obtain extra goods from if you meet the required standards. However for crafting and mission skills, you'll have to rely on your companions; you send them off from a list of short mission descriptions that give you an idea of what they're going to do but you never see them do this, so that small part is basically just flavor text. However, what does happen is that when you send someone off they get a timer before they come back and the mission is completed (or failed if you're unlucky) and you simply just have to wait around, you can still do whatever, until they come back, then you get your items and they're free to stay with you again.
As I said before I had a problem with this system because it honestly didn't seem like it fit a lot of the companions that they announced at the time, they were heavily described as being famous and with no knowledge of the back round of the character that you're playing, you can just assume you start off as a lowly individual and make your way up as the game progresses. With that said, I saw no reason why famous people would even consider aiding you in gathering resources rather than having you do them yourself. I later on decided that the new system sounded actually pretty interesting with that detail aside, and it's further even more interesting when I first tinkered with it in game.
The first thing that removed my problems with the system is that I don't know why, but companions aren't nearly as famous as they're described as in the SWTOR site, in fact most of them are unique individuals in a very low profile position that somehow come to joining you in your adventure. The next thing is that I believe sending companions off is very balanced because you do still have to participate in a sense, as you're giving them money (credits) to use while they're off on missions, this turns out to be very expensive with how often you send people off, and later on when the missions are much longer before they complete, it simply just becomes more expensive rather than a small amount of money in large doses. Lastly there's the issue with time, even 5 minutes is not short compared to the 3 seconds it takes to mine a node in World of Warcraft, and later on when it takes 30 minutes to gather 5 of the most meager high level materials, it's very time costly, and while it is true that you still can be doing nothing while they're off working, you probably could gather 100 materials in 30 minutes in WoW.
So in the end, my conclusion is crew skills are a slight combination of traditional and a more unique style of crafting, you still could definitely gather materials by hand if you want, but you can't do all of it by yourself, but simply having the option there is enough for me at least to satisfy any traditionalist needs. On the other hand with the unique versus traditional part, it simply comes down to that one requires more work, the other requires more time and a small to medium degree of work. I think in that sense it balances out perfectly, and as a side benefit it's much more relaxing to be able to send companions off to gather for you while you get to eat your breakfast or something similar.
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