Yeah, I've been looking at quite a few professions in other games and I do agree with you. The limitations currently are amount of encounters and not in every one will there be something gatherable, then later more about whoever is first to get to certain spawns with unique and random respawn timers.
i.e. flowers and fruits may respawn more often naturally as they grow faster, but you can't just camp one and expect it to respawn every 10mins, as it may take 1min or 20 to respawn, etc.
For non-nft's, we will have to have some kind of auction yes, but also allow direct trading/ C.O.D mails.
or create professions like jewel crafting , scribing and alchemy that can extract bonus items from raw materials but only with a low droppiong chance until reached max profession level like you see in modern day WOW .
We will start out with a few, so things don't take longer than they have. herbalism and mining, but we definitely wanna create different talent trees for both gathering and crafting professions so they can specialise into different things, like for instance jewelcrafting.
well i might start a grinding character always prefer to grind and let others fight