Those are fair enough & decent ideas.
The fire/cold/lightning affix shards give bigger numbers than the elemental protection shards (eg, the t1 gives ~44% more protection to the specific element). Different classes get different protections from passives & skills, or maybe they got an otherwise very good item dropped with a single-element suffix & you need to balance things out with a different single-element suffix.
Personally I think that’s a bad idea. Every aRPG with the hunt for loot/item grind has RNG in there somewhere to slow down the rate at which the player gets to their desired loot. In LE, the places we “interact” with the RNG is for the desired base to drop, with a decently rolled implicit, with 2-3 of the desired affixes that are decent tiers. But the upside of LE’s crafting is that we get to choose what affixes we want in a far more player-friendly way than, say, PoE where it’s entirely random (notwithstanding that you can use certain crafting mats to narrow the odds a bit for specific types of affix). I absolutely hate crafting in PoE because it feels so soul-destroying to just spam chaos/essences/fossils to try & get the affixes you want & because I don’t play enough I don’t get enough currency to do the crafting myself (or much in the way of trading).
So yes, I agree, it’s not fun for an item to brick , but it also (IMO) really sucks to not be able to choose the specific affixes I want on an item. But there has to be a line somewhere, otherwise you get to the point where you’re just pressing a button &the game gives you the gear you want & then you’re bored a lot quicker…
There’s also a thread going over all of this (which you’ve probably not read since you’re new).
And gambling for the decent bases, you can spend an obscene amount on that. Plus the devs have said that the current use of gold isn’t where they want it to be, so there will/should be more uses for gold “soon”.
Yeah, that could be interesting.