Why waste time and effort skilling up up crafting professions when you can just use the services of a guild crafter. All they require is the materials from gathering and then you are helping them skill up.

Guild crafter, may not always be there.
It can be a good break, from the normal mob grinding.
There could be an element of achievement, in doing the proffesions.
Not sure yet, but sometimes you can make gold of the professions to.

I too kinda think that professions at large may be overhyped in terms of many people having the same one. I can understand that people want a crafting profession just to feel abit more valuable or coherent with what others are working on though.

At the end of the day, getting the cities maxed out is the biggest task of them all, i dont think any raid can give loot that has a relevance worthy of taking up resourcegrinding time, but at the same time I guess its a nice break from things.