The economy is always tricky to balance out. Things that work during booms in population cease to function when things die down like in MO1. So in theory a lot of the specialization from the first game might have appeared to function ok with a healthy population, but most of us experienced how it broke down when few people were playing. But I don't know really how it could be designed differently to function with low pop, when that is just a symptom of a dying game where it isn't just the economy suffering.
I also don't know how they could make extraction related jobs fun in the game. Most people do those things for the end result not the journey, the process in itself will always become a chore the more you do it however they implement it whether via a mini game or timer, or some other thing. Even more so when people only take part in those systems out of necessity in the first place.
The only caveat in regard to timers is that, while I don't enjoy them, they do serve a function of creating value to the materials themselves since the most common attributes for determining somethings value are it's time and difficulty to produce, which then constrains supply and scarcity creates value, and then you get the kind of tiers of value we have with products like flakestone, steal, cronite etc.
Many who were understandably frustrated with the timers in the first game wanted no timers at all, but asking for that is asking to disrupt the natural structure of the economy. That means that simply removing timers alone could never be a solution because it would create other disruptive problems. The solution would require turning other knobs at the same time to try to balance every other aspect of production, so if you shorten extraction then you'd need to increase mining times (which then becomes a bigger chore) or decrease durability heavily (which then kitting out your character more often becomes the chore). In any case where you turn one dial down, you've got to turn another one up to balance that change, which I am cool with. I feel like at least trying to iterate on prior systems is the best way to improve things, some of those changes might not work out, and in that case you still have the old way of doing things as a baseline to go back to.
They definitely need to figure out a way to encourage taking part in the greater economy tho by maximizing use of a broker with some QoL improvements. If they can get this aspect right it should help counter issues with both feeling the need to supply yourself with all your personal material or weapon/armor/potion/pet needs, and also make it so choosing to focus on any given production within those trades, such as only metal or raw materials would be viable enough for a players income.
If the barriers are low enough, and the tools useful enough we should be able to have base materials become commodities that are traded in high volume for competitive prices for all to make use of.
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