In addition to the points made by the op and the other commenters, there should have been a fair amount of time given for pre-crafting before the announcement was made of not "previewing" the said gear anymore in order for more people to be given a chance to do so.
I was one of the fortunate ones to have pre-crafted the gears for my most important arena squad characters. But because of the issue only about 30-40 players in my arena shard in the top 100-200 are continuously active now and the others have decided to either completely stop playing the game or rather not care anymore due to the increased gap between geared up squads and bottlenecked ones.
Also, what is the point of having one of the exclusive raid gears available in shipments if the rest of them are only available with guild raid rewards or guild currency? That is clearly not enough for most player squad rosters to live off of. As of now, only the heroic/T7 raid is relevant for players to do in order to get these more elusive gears at a fairer or faster pace and not all guilds can finish them (the gap between the t6 and t7 rewards is astonishingly wide).
This commotion has caused a shock wave of problems and is still reverberating throughout the entire player base and is probably the main cause of guild hopping. I don't know why this issue has never been addressed by you but it has been one of the major gripes for most of your consumers. It's good that the op is tackling this again because it is clearly being forgotten because of inaction. Please at least do something about it.
Thank you.
