Several recent posts have discussed various issues concerning the balance between gathering professions and crafting professions. For example:
http://forums.hunted...showtopic=57540
http://forums.hunted...showtopic=57551
Another issue to consider is XP potion duration. At 1 and 2 hours, they are fairly long. While it is possible to spend an hour gathering something, 2 is a bit much. Better if they were 1/2 and 1 hours (for a correspondingly reduced EP price).
More importantly, the 1 hour XP potion is way, way too much time for any reasonable concentrated crafting effort. You simply can't carry enough mats, with the most lavish collections of large bags and lots of sacks to be crafting for even 20 minutes, usually far less. The rest of the time will go to waste.
In addition to tuning the duration of potions to 1/2 and 1 hour, an additional possible solution that approaches all of this from a completely different direction is to increase crafting time and XP gain from crafting something. By at least a factor of 5, and arguably more. So (hypothetically) while processing gathered mats into crafting-ready goods happens quickly (at the current rate) and give some modest gathering-skill XP; crafting finished goods is time-consuming, and by the principle that the amount of time/effort spent is proportional to the XP gained, the XP yield from this effort the correspondingly increased. This will improve the XP balance between the gathering and crafting professions in general.
The longer time spent crafting each item will also allow the XP potion duration to cover the full time spent crafting, justifying it's use.
This would be in addition to tuning crafting XP gain (and time, I suppose) to be greater for special recipes - those containing rare mats and generating special items (blues or higher).