The one thing stopping me from playing this game again

I've played FE off and on. First starting with the pre-order pre-launch, playing a couple months to then quit. I came back dfuring the free month for returning players, and played a couple more months, only to quit again.

Overall I had fun in the game, but it was a lot of little nagging issues that would always push me away...

The crafting system leaves a lot to be desired... My main character was a Pistols/Medic which let me also be a crafter due to INT. The crafting system is interesting because 95% of the iems in game can be crafted. That said, it's also extremely shallow. It's nothing more than collecting X, Y, Z materials and queuing it up in the craftign queue. There's little feeling of accomplishment, and every single one of a particular item has the exact same stats. Furthermore, If you can max one crafting tree, you can max all of them. There's no specialization other than the time it takes to gain skills, which isn't that hard if you have the mats. You just queue up and log off.

There is no end game... and I don't mean raiding, I mean, anything. There's no purpose or drive to keep playing the game at max level. PvP is pretty much pointless in the game, and even so I otherwise avoided it because of the ridiculous decay death penalties (which I think they fixed). Once I managed to make my own interceptor, I felt like I had no more goals to strive for.

Combat is clunky... the targetting mechanic is just plain bugged, for one. If you're zoomed out, you can turn your character to face away from an enemy, but have your zoomed out camera view closer to the enemy, and still aim/hit the enemy with greater accuracy because it's 'closer' to the aim of your camera.

The lack of respecs... which it did look promising that they have offered some respecs recently, It wasn't the desire to have full complete AP allocation resets. I would have been content with being able to gradually drop assigned AP via grinding. Just having some way of being able to adjust or correct mistakes. At times I felt like I spent more time worrying about how to use my AP, than I did actually playing and enjoying the game.

Most of these things were tolerable to a point. Alone they're not overly major issues. I could handle running out of things to do endgame and just roll a new character... but that brings me to the main showstopper for me.

The AP quest grind. This is the biggest irk of the entire game for me. For a game that was advertised as a sandbox game, we get an advancement system that pretty much locks you into jumping through hoops down a list of quests and quest chains. If you don't, your character is "gimped". If you do, you have to go to ridiculous feats. Now, I know you don't "have" to collect all the AP, but I'm an achiever. I like to feel that my character is "complete"  and not handicapped in some way. As such I felt compelled to chase down the extra AP, which became a terribly tedious, frustrating, and outright monotonous endevor -- and I didn't even do the wheel grind. I felt like I was being punished for not being able to play the game my way, and just explore and scavenge. This was exacerbated when I did try to roll alts, because I felt compelled to go through the exact same nonsense over again... which is the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

Otherwise, the game was fun and refreshing compared to other MMOs these days. Overall I logged just under 500 hours into the game, so it's not neccessarily a terrible game... just one with a few too many little big flaws.