Crafting is missing the mark in an interesting way

Many people don't even consider the current orb system as crafting and purely from a roleplaying perspective there's truth in that.

You have these samey looking orbs in your inventory and you somehow magically, mysteriously "use" them on your gear. Is your character an enchanter? How did they learn to utilize these strange items? 🤷‍♂️ So, it doesn't make much sense from a roleplaying perspective how our characters can use them in the first place. Do they consume them somehow? Do they smash them onto the gear or do they gently tap them and magic happens? Maybe they attach them onto it 🤷‍♂️ Anyhow, POE2 does literally nothing to address this. It doesn't even attempt to try.

The obvious question; Would a vendor solve this roleplaying issue? Would it add to the immersion and give the player the illusion of physically crafting their gear? Depending on the implementation, I would say yes it would help. Going to a crafting specialist and handing over your gear along with the required crafting materials, choosing what you want to do and then seeing some sort of cool animation in the end could fill this immersion gap.
Another way of doing it is maybe the character having access to some sort of device that can do all the crafting on the go instead of them. Whatever it is, in the end of the day I do feel crafting feels kind of tacked on and not very immersive.

Crafting is fine. With more leagues, more will be added. Don't expect to get everything at once. People too used to PoE1's madness of 40+ expansions and want more options. Well, no. In time - maybe.