You’re right. Professions are a broken mess - and the issue is that they have to be because if they’re not, you can buy good gear with gold - but gold is tied to real money.
Do players other than RWF! Raiders actually use a full range of Alchemy consumables for every encounter they face? I carry Flasks on my characters, but so rarely use them that I wonder why, sometimes… I NEVER use potions, except during WoD when they were required for Cloaks.
Ooops; I forgot… I use Healing & Rejuvenation Potions.
My last recollection of useful items from Professions - apart from Food - was in WoD.
Even if a character uses a potion once every 5 dungeons, they’re still using alchemy more than they’ll use LW or BS or tailoring, which basically aren’t used at all beyond gear crafting.
I don’t consider myself hardcore and I bring pots and flasks to m+ and why not? I have an alchemist on my roster and mats to spare so they always send my chars goods.
But my tailor? My LWer? Send barely anything. Drums are pointless cause groups insist on BL as drums is just a crap BL (stupid change) and the stamina chest stuff is a bit ehhh. Whereas pots (and now oils, way to give alchemy more perks) always make an impact.
I mean oils. They’re dirt cheap and basically a free common damage proc. Why would you not use them? They last an hour as well! Pots I get, they are short lived, but oils are very good for their price.
My Embalming oil in my MW ATM at his ilevel heals him for 350 a proc. Even if I only assume one prof per 10 secs that’s 60,000 free healing over the oils lifetime, not factoring crits. At my ilevel that’s over twice my health. If I take a dungeon length of average 20 mins it means I’ll get about 90% of my health for free healed over the duration of the dungeon.
If I out that into vivify costs based upon base vivify and gusts healing, it does the work of about 10 vivifys, so saves me 19000 mana over the course of the dungeon (about 37% of my mana pool)
If Primary Professions were removed, I think I’d only miss Enchanting; maybe JC unless Sockets got removed, as well.
Why do I continue to level Crafting Professions…? 'Cos they’re there.
Id miss alchemy most, enchanting only for weapon enchants because they’re interesting. The rest is just small % boosts whereas Alchemy pots offer timed application which means you can really maximise a burst window. Also oils as said, and then the health and mana, invis, flasks…
Alchemy is just utterly broken in how good it is compared to the others. The others need massive buffs to their usefulness in content. Engineering, the “utility” profession, barely competes with alchemy, it’s absurd.
Don’t fully agree with that, although I’m not suggesting you are 100% incorrect.
I started Shadowlands with near Zero gold. I just spent the time farming the Materials to make my 1st Rank 4 Legendary right at the very start. when you could still sell Rank 1 Legos at a profit. But it took alot of time invested into the game to get there.
I had a 2nd toon, which also needed a lego, so I used some profits to craft these legos, and by the time you were crafting Rank 2/3 You could usually Craft 1, sell it, Craft 2 with the income. I also used my profits from my initial Lego to buy the 10k gold Eternal Shards to max out my Enchanting… which led to huge profits Enchanting Crafting materials for sale, and made huge savings when’s I was crafting my own legendaries.
So No. You did not need Money to control the lego market early on. you just needed to get in early and have the time to invest.
Might have to reevaluate those Oils… might be more beneficial to use (in bag space, at least) than Flasks.
If you’re looking for stuff that is bang for buck, then flasks and oil, as both yield a long benefit. Flask persist on death, oil doesn’t as far as I am aware, but oil is way cheaper.
Pots I wouldn’t recommend for people outside of content they’re pushing in (aka it’s not a faceroll) as they cost a lot and you chew through them fast.
But oils and flasks, hell yeah if you can afford it or have an alchy char get them on pretty much all pve content imo.
Food I also always use and cooking is like one of the first things I max in expo, food buffs are significant and easy to get tbh. No reason to ignore them. Cooking is also a sleeper profit maker at points in game. I made the money for my rustbolt resistor in BFA off food profit and nothing else by getting the higher food recipies early and producing tons of them. The crit sandwiches (which required spare parts) sold for loads because they required Mechagon components (as did feasts) and I stopped needing them early so made a crapton off feast and sandwich selling.
It helped that feast reagent was BoP (crate) so people couldn’t trade mats or buy them to craft, they had to rely upon someone giving up their spare parts to make feasts, which not a huge amount of people did early. I did though, because hell yeah. At one point I was selling feasts for like 5k each and they were selling as well. But the sandwiches were the main moneymaker, at some points in the game I’d log in to like 10-20k profit in sandwich sales every day. Could easily get the mats to make like 1000 or them after an hour or two in Mechagon. Easy money.
If I can make it, I’ll (pretty much) never buy it… I’ll get my Mage* on that. 
*My primary Alchemist.
Ah you like me then? I have all SL profs maxed ATM, even if the chars are level 50 still. I hate not being self sufficient.
I usually have a couple of chars for gathering too, so double gathering to help keep my mats up, else I just pair the gathering with the crafting prof. But having two Skinners is a must in SL given I play Alts, as LW recipies require whacko mat amounts.
Master of All, since it was a thing, me…
Only two…?? LOL Having four may have been why I had - at one point - approx. 8000 Desolate Leather. 
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Yes. Yes they do. Flasks and pots (dps, mana and health) are most certainly mandatory in every progression raid. This is not World First exclusive. Some guilds may pop potions later, some sooner. Dependent on encounter even straight from the start. Flasks are up all the time. There are even pugs “demanding” the usage of flasks (although i ignore that. If im in a hc pug on my rogue i refuse to flask. Different matter with an alt)
Same applies to dungeons although potions due to their nature and that of the dungeons have a more situational usage compared to raids. Lets also not talk about Invis potions.
Also Oils. Although BS can craft the counterpart (which one is better is highly situational)
And now lets see for what profit you could have sold the mats for compared to the lego. Lego crafting for XP became counter productive hella fast. However this varies from realm to realm. On my realm if you werent part of the first bunch that got to Rank 4 you were better off by a lot to not xp craft them. Also depending what Legendary slots were more favoured given how dirt cheap tailor legos are to be made. Or Rings.
Proffession bonuses. I miss my miners having +5% stamina just because. Or my skinners having +crit.
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Well, I’m sure from the original batch, if I had sold the crafting materials then and there, I would have made more profit than selling my first batch of legos… but the profits would have stopped there and then.
what actually happened was the profits got invested into the materials to level up new Rank 4 and I was crafting legos all the way through from Launch until Easter All I was doing was Selling 1, Crafting 1 Rank 4 and listing it on AH. Play some game for a bit, and then come back to check if it’s sold.
It was probably start of March that I started finding I needed to spend time Cancel/Scanning, and after the easter weekend (which was a huge Weekend for Lego Sales), I dropped out of the market because I had made enough gold and the profit margin on most of the legos I was crafting was an absolute minimum. I don’t even bother with Legos at the moment, I made more money doing callings everyday on my 5 toons.
So I would say, the profits from Ranking up to 4 far outweighed the Cost and time investment involved in farming and selling the materials.
Edit, just to respond to your other part. I concentrated on Plate and Cloth, manly because my 2 mains were those classes (Paladin and Mage). I only ranked up the legendaries that I needed myself.
Sharpening & Weightstones…?? Got/made some of those for my pair of (trasmog’d) The Black Hand(s).
I liked that I could do ring enchants on my enchanter, or make special gems on my jewelcrafter, or add extra sockets on my blacksmith etc.
Yes. Although the amount of classes even using the stones is absolutely laughable in comparison to the ones that use the oil.
simple way to solve it, make it like it used to be in pandaland … mainly bop items that were above the wq level and worth crafting, even during leveling-up. Personally, id prefer them to be boa.
profs are now all about providing consumables for raids.
gods how i miss the 3 choices of alchemy, i made sooo much money with flask procs and transmute procs.
If you make the craftable items boe, youll just get factory multiscummers producing massive amounts of the items and the price will collapse … so dont fall in to that trap, blizz.
boa items that are stronger than wq/other types (irrespective of level) of easy gear and a boa bank that you can put them in so that your alts can get em easy. thats the way to go blizz. Couple of epic boes too, all through the leveling process … you could make a 57 epic that would be decent at max level etc. as another poster said, items from mythic (no not mythic +300) needed to craft weapons thatd do for heroic raiding.
Needed, balance is… in all things in WoW.