I'll try to answer what Jumbo didn't, but you have some fair concerns. And try keep myself coherent as well.
1) I can make items to sell - Well, if all I cared about was money, there is probably 1 efficient way to make the most money and I'd just do that (like mining or soemthing) instead of the time/effort/money for crating & selling.
While you can make "free" money with gathering, the money that craters can make is significantly higher. Because there's so little barrier to entry for gatherers, gathering mats that aren't time gated generally sell for very little unless sold in high quantities. The very simple act of turning a raw stone into an ingot raises its price by a lot, and in some cases, there's niche markets to profit from with people having moved on to the 50-60 range and ignoring the low level market.
Which isn't to say that gathering isn't a profitable venture too. Just be prepared to sink in the time and effort needed to gather the mats that
don't sell for less than 1k gil each.
2) I can make equipment for myself - Say I start a new Lancer, at lvl.10 or lvl.15 I can either jump to Brentbarch Meadows / Hawthorn Hut, go up to the NPC and buy a lvl.10/lvl.15 full armor set for like 1,000 gil in 3 minutes, or I can look through my recipes, find out who makes each piece, get the materials, and craft each piece of armor. This probably would take like 15-25 mins of work and cost like 200-500 gil. Aka, there's no point. And even at high level, assuming the costs/time involved in making i120/i130 type stuff, it's probably faster to just run a trial roullete a few times to get the poetics and trade them. Again, I don't think this is actually useful. While I've had some fun continually outfitting all my crafters/mining/botany with the top equipment for their levels since they're all in the same level range, the fact I can just jump to Quarrymill at lvl.25 or something like that and in 3 mins buy a full top level set just makes me think I'm wasting my time and I should just buy all the crafting/gathering equipment. Since I only keep 1 combat job in my armory, the entire rest is just a 10-20 level range of crafting/gathering equipment.
There's probably a bit of clearing up on how item levels work for crafted gear. If you decide to outfit yourself in HQ gear, you don't actually need to gear up at every new level tier while leveling up, saving yourself some money in the process. I'll take this level 15 HQ iron hatchet as an example, and compare it to the NQ level 19 Initiate's Hatchet.
Even though its a lower item level, the HQ level 15 hatchet has the same stats as the NQ level 19 hatchet. So unless you go out of your way to craft HQ gear for every new leveling tier, you wouldn't need to replace your gear until all the way to level 23. This is the biggest perk to crafting your own gear while leveling, the freedom to just completely ignore some of the new gear coming because the old shit you made is just as good.
Heavensward introduced crafted endgame gear that serves as good filler equipment to get an early lead on raids when you still don't have your blue tomestone/raid drop gear, and even then some crafted pieces remain the best you can equip on that slot for a long time. For reference, blue gear has the equivalent to HQ stats for that item level.
3) I can make furniture - well I can just buy it from NPCs
There is a LOT of cool housing furniture you can't buy from NPCs. A LOT.5) I can make cool pieces of equipment that I can then use for glamor - If I can't just buy these items from NPCs, this is the first actual worthwhile thing I can do with my crafters.
They actually keep adding more and more crafted glamour pieces with each patch. If you look at the Market board for any of the left side gear, you'll see a fuckton of level 1 pieces at the very bottom of the list that don't have any stats: They're all glamour pieces only obtainable through crafting (some get added as rewards for side content, but the vast majority are still craft only). As well as the blue glowing primal weapons you can find at the level 50 area in the market board.
6) I can make glamor prisms for way cheaper than the 5k a piece they sell on the AH - this is useful because glamor/fashion is fun.
7) I get to experience the job quest storylines - ok, hopefully these are good and add something worthwhile.
More or less the last few quests for 1-50 all introduce an actual plot besides "ur getting more skilled at the craft", then HW added some actual straight up story to ALL the crafting and gathering jobs. There's a reason why we keep saying the expansion is fantastic.
8 ) I get the satisfaction of crafting items from scratch and seeing if I can do something and doing it - This is enjoyable although can get expensive to craft everything[/b]
This will naturally come with time as you learn what is and isnt worth crafting. There's a lot of gear and items that have been added to NPCS purely to make it easier for newcomers to get into the whole ordeal rather than chase them off, but believe me, crafting is easier than ever right now. Between the massive exp boosts in the manuals they give out for free, the Ixal dailies and the cheap gear they hand out, it takes way less time to do now at 1-50 than it used to take before.
But you know what? If you end up thinking you shouldn't bother with crafting anymore, its completely ok to just set it aside and stick to battle content. Tons of people do that and are just as happy playing the game as suckers like me who invest millions of gear into crafting and barely break even.
I actually make most of my money fleecing people on the market board by reselling items like orchestrion rolls for 100x the npc price because people don't know you can get them for way cheaper there.