You missed the boat in 3.2, but that was a long time ago and 3.4 is around the corner (most likely late September) and it will raise the ilvl with new raids.

New recipes then will be added and all the rage.

But no, it's very very rare for a crafted anything to beat the max ilvl gear from raiding/tomestones.

Also the player economy is booming all the time. I have hundreds of millions of gil and missed the 3.2 boat as well. You just have to learn to identify markets. You can spend all day at 60 crafting level 50 furniture that sells for HUGE markups over its mat cost and you dont even need gear for that, just level 60 white gear will be fine.

You can gear up fully and sell ironworks gear (and especially hq materials) for easy profit.

I can macro craft the 3 star HQ materials (high mythrite ingot/eikon leather/etc) with the new ironworks gear. It cost like 40k or less in mats to make an item that sells for 120-150k, and I can just churn them out and people buy them up.

And thats just two markets out of at least a hundred. Ya just gotta do the legwork.

The simplest thing to do is throughout a week of play, make a list everytime you need something in game. Did you buy something off the MB or admire something there? So did thousands of other players. Make it for them!