For the majority of playerbase who found themselves caught into the orbit of the game by the confluence of factors, which would rather be reviewed by psychiatrist, the new players of this world as seemed to me lacked understanding why would they stay in the game, and which achievement will they pursue.
They were talking about game potential and their inspirations, fantasized about what they could get there, but didn't stayed in game anyway.
From the perspective of game design, there seems not to be enough engaging mechanics that pulls players into the game. The amount of recipes bombarding craft menu each time you obtain pretty basic materials, on the contrary, I find too overwhelming for new players.
What I propose as solution is to separate most crafting recipes to be opened by quests and achievements, so that you need to perform action multiple times in order to be able to craft certain recipe. E.g. to craft certain fur item from animal hide, you have do kill x animal certain amount of times, or tree quest providing useless salad recipe after you harvest enough lettuce.
It doesn't have to be gating mechanics preventing players from achieving what they want, but instead diversify what players could do based on their preferred activities.