People like myself are pretty much the reason every game with a decent budget tacks on a crafting system I think. I love designing things in games to the extent that a decent crafting system and some complex mechanics is enough to sell me on some games outright. I even play DnD as an alchemist trapmaker. When it comes to games in general I'm not very skilled, I'm not a great platformer compared to others with the same amount of practice, I like RTSs but I'm not very good at them even after thousands of hours of play, I don't have godlike aim in first-person shooters. I am by all measure a mediocre gamer at 99% of games.
I work as an Engineer though and I don't think that's an accident. I love making things even with the simplified systems in games and I'm very patient. To the extent that it drives my wife insane. I don't really get into the power fantasy or get sucked in very well by the gameplay loop generally, but if you give me the means to do so I will spend hours and hours customizing, crafting, and exploring the design space the game has given me. The feeling of building from the ground up and designing a solution to a problem is amazingly satisfying to me even in the very limited forms you find in games.
As far as games I'd recommend if this sounds like you,
Any Zachtronics game. These things are basically crack for me. You get nice tidy little problems and the tools to solve them. It's described as a puzzle game but really it's more a design game. Instead of most puzzles where you're trying to find the solution the developers had in mind in Zachtronic's games you're just trying to build a product.
KSP, it's a game about building space ships and trying not to explode. I don't think I need to push to hard to sell this one because pretty much everyone already knows about it.
Dwarf Fortress. The learning curve of this game is a brick wall with failure seeming to ride on the coattails of every success. If you can get past the unintuitive interface though there are hours of fun to be had here.
X3: Terran Conflict allows you to build up from the pilot of a fighter trying to save up for some real weaponry to the largest economic and military might in the Galaxy. Some of my favorite moments in all of gaming have come from here and it's probably the most traditionally approachable game on this list.
Aurora (4x). This game is honestly a little hard to recommend just because it's both unintuitive and lacks many of the resources needed to learn it. You play the authority of Earth after discovering transnewtonian materials. Effectively materials which allow the earth to break away from the limitations of traditional speed of light physics and the limitations of traditional industry. From there you need to expand out across the solar system and beyond. It in in that way a traditional 4x game, what makes it different is that you design literally everything you build from the absolute ground up. This game offers more customization than any other I've played in that regard, it's kind of amazing if you can penetrate it but you'll need a bit of an imagination and a lot of patience to get their because the game itself looks like this.
Nand2Tetris. Now you might be saying, "Wait that's basically a college course not a game." To which I'd say. Yeah pretty much, but I think it contains many of the same elements I'd look for in a game. You design in a nice tidy design space to meet a specification. First designing hardware using a VHDL like language to build a processor starting from nand gates will all kinds of tests along the way. Then you take that processor and write an assembly like language for it. Then a virtual machine language above that. Until at the highest level you rediscover and implement the principles of object oriented programming. If you replace the word "Project" in the course screen with "Level" you'd have probably my favorite game of all time so I'm putting it here anyway.
