upgrades needing them self

[Forward]

Generally speaking, that is true but the gold sinks have been too effective which lead to our current predicament in the first place. If any, what we need is more gold to increase the overall price level. Ultimately it will probably barely increase the general want of a low demand item like the Dragon spear but it will surely help reinvigorate the economy.

Why do "we need [...] to increase the overall price level"?

What we have now is fair result of supply and demand. There is no rule that lootable "junk" should be better or more expensive then housecrafted "junk".

I do agree that it is perfectly sensible that a better legendary is worth less than it's house craftable counterpart in a free market with a much higher supply of the former. My point was that it dropped in terms of value below the craftable just because the general value of and want for gold allowed for this to happen in the first place. 

The value of many craftables by now consists mainly of their "gold sinks" and the demand for them because of their requirement in certain upgrades.

But from my perspective it's completely fine, I think it's better if Dragon Spears will be used by new/poor players instead of gathering dust in rich people inventories. And if rich people will be able to use them for some crafts it will become even worse, when rich will become even richer. This mod is not dead apparently only because it still bring new players somehow. So think about them and whats better for them, not whats better for rich minority.

I completely agree with most of your points, I stated before that I don't think Woody's idea would be beneficial if it were implemented. Also, I don't think removing the gold sinks from craftables is the right way to go.

All I tried to say was, that the gold gained should be significantly increased, which in turn would also increase the value of legendaries, maybe above the value of their craftable counterparts. This could be easily done by introducing double XP events more often.

At the risk of going off topic here, one of the most important purposes of gold is to exchange an item for it (gold) in order to get another item for the gold at a later point in time, as it is very unlikely that another person selling your desired item wants the item you are offering. This aspect is completely obsolete as every gold coin is sucked up by the gold sink, i. e. legendary upgrades. It's fairly obvious that that is not the intended purpose of the original implementation, or at least I hope it's not.

Increasing gold gained will also increase materials prices and therefore crafted items prices as well, so nothing going to change drastically.

And in any virtual economy worst thing possible is an inflation, so it's completely fine when gold demand is high for all these sinks. Many gold in economy will not result people using it as exchange agent as well, because no one will want it.

And if some craftables is unusable with this system - whatever, this mod has another 100000 never used assets. In big picture whole game is about legendaries and not about some junk crafted from nord old boots.