When I think of bulkproduction in a game, I quickly lose my affection with the game that allows that. Somehow it creates a distance with my crafting character and with the items themselves. "What's another 100 boards, right?" The perceived value of those items is lowered.
We know that harvesting will render us with raw nodes that will require smelting (or similar refining technique) to turn these into components to craft with. Which also means there will be plenty of smelting/refining to be done. Especially some time after launch, when the economy is expanding and stabilizing. The same goes for crafting those components themselves.
The suggestion I'm making here: If you have 100 items of the same thing to build, you can actually go to an npc and take up a crafting order. This crafting order tells you to craft different items and when handing in the quest items, you receive your 100 overturned items. This could kill the monotony, by offering diversity. It goes without saying that the time it would take you to build those 100 items yourself, matches the time it takes to complete the NPC-work order. (A possible (acceptable?) downside might be, that he'll offer no rares derived from the wolfskins.)
Example: I have 100 raw wolfskins. Treating 1 wolfskin takes me 5 seconds. And so it will take me 500 seconds (8+minutes) to treat all the wolfskins myself. But instead I go to a thanner in town. I offer him my 100 skins and in return I take up a leatherworking quest. This quest requires me to crafting multiple different items and takes up 500 seconds to complete. The resources are handed over by the NPC when I accept the quest. These resources are no-trade, no-value, no-destroy, quest-only items. The chance to get a rare while producing these different items is fully related to your character and is still present.
If I don't want to continue the quest anymore. I hand in what I've made and the npc returns me equal amount of treated skin and the rest of the raw wolfskins.
There might be a treshold set up. This might be, you need at least 25 pelts (25 pelts x 5 seconds= 125 seconds = 2,08 minutes) to be able to initiate this quest with that npc. This means that, you can't just hand over 4 pelts. But when you've reached a stack that would require you to do the same actions over and over for more than 2minutes, you'll get the option to initiate this quest. Why do this? To actually keep some value to the items themselves as in situations where you have less than 25, you'll invest that time in crafting them yourself. Which keeps you in touch with your chosen profession, etc.
I think this would really work well to disrupt the monotony of producing in bulk. Don't get me wrong, you can still produce all of the same items yourself. Be it one at the time. It just offers a different path for those players that dislike doing the same thing over and over again.
What are your thoughts on this?
Sidenote: apologies for using a different header.. I started off with a different idea, but I can't edit the title. But Kilsin or Nephele if you can edit that to; Bulkproduction a different approach.