How I can I deprive myself of games I've found utterly pointless and unfun? I've tried enough in those categories to know that games with such features are generally not games, but highly grindy and/or awkwardly designed treadmills that one has to willingly convince themselves to be fun.

I try not to be masochistic in my choice of games, thank you very much.

I haven't played too many games with crafting systems, but of those I have, The Witcher 3's systems I enjoyed the most overall. Some games the crafting gets rather tedious over time and becomes like trying to open the combination lock on your guitar case after your friend thought it would be funny to change the combination on you after finding the case unlocked. Not cool. :) (Generally that means brute forcing every possible combination up to 1000 attempts.)

The Witcher 3 was more recipe, collect materials, go to work, done, NEXT! No grinding endless combinations etc.

I didn't dislike the crafting system per se in The Witcher 3 but I didn't like that particular part about reusing alcohol, it felt cheap and too streamlined for some reason but it was easily solved by adding a mod. Not that I like grinding endlessly for ingredients but there's an important middle ground to aim for.

I like crafting because it feels you are enjoying a creative activity as opposed to killing things, gives a good contrast. That said, there's usually rules that I don't like. Taking out a gem or other things you can socket is usually too expensive and I prefer games that promote customization rather than limitation for the sake of difficulty.

As I grow older, the more I dislike becoming a trash collector to make disposable doodads. I much prefer Zelda-Metroid item collection, in that there are permanent upgrades to be discovered. It respects my time, preventing repetitious grinding.

That ties to one of the reasons why I don't look forward to the Breath of the Wild: It feels like Zelda is moving towards Skyrim-style junk, rather than the formula that I prefer.

I think it's pretty much impossible to avoid one of those pitfalls. I almost think it would have to be something like letting the player choose between a crafting and trading/looting system when starting the game.

You quickly unlock a character with an indestructible axe. He's fun to play.

Not quickly enough apparently. And it's not just about the axe, which I used figuratively, but about the whole build stuff, die, build it all over again gameplay. It's just not for me. It's no fun for me, to me it's just tidious.

Well, I'll worry about it once I have a new PC to play it on, and that probably won't happen for a while yet. Unless I craft one :D

Well, that's an item I always enjoy crafting!

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, as far as crafting in the Witcher games is concerned, the first game did it best, imho, although opinions seem to vary vastly on that topic.
I find the automatic replenishing of your potions etc in TW3 to be a bit of a crutch to help out gamers that really can't be bothered. It doesn't really follow in-game logic either, and renders collecting herbs etc. completely pointless for 95% of the game. Really, if there was an option to turn it off, I would. (Crafting armor/weapons is fine, although you really only need to craft very few items).
In the first game, you wanted a potion/coating for your sword, you had to collect the materials (that you could also buy for the most part after accumulating some wealth), it was simple and quite effective. In TW2, the interface was just too confusing and kind of cumbersome to work with.
All that being said, the crafting is just such a minor part of these games, I can't quite believe that this is the "best system" out there? I don't usually go for games that feature crafting a lot, but it seems weird to me that the Witcher games display crafting at its finest...?

I continued collecting ingredients throughout the game, as I'm a packrack, so not sure but: if you don't have the ingredients in your inventory will the potions still replenish? I thought you still needed the proper ingredients to re-up the potions.

That certainly made it more tolerable for me, not having to guess for recipes. Or at least not for recipes in that first tier of crafting with that particular raw material. I'll admit, though, that Terraria still left me Alt-Tabbing a lot for crafting, mostly because it didn't show you the backwards path of another branch of the crafting tree for a particular item. But that system was still better than many others out there.

I WANT to like it, but...

that ^^^ - spend half the game looking for materials to make an item that is worse than stuff you looted / bought earlier. Yay. Craft it, look at it, sell it because it was made redundant by something you found long ago.

and this ^^^, because inventory management can be a pain in the ass in a lot of games.

Yeah, I did so as well, with some stuff, but it's utterly pointless, unless you're really really poor... You don't need any ingredients anymore once you've crafted the item once, only the strong spirit. And since there's an overabundance of that...
I understand many people prefer it that way, but I kind of like that part of exploration - find rare plants that'll only grow in certain spots (which is, as I said, kind of pointless in TW3 since you'll only ever need about 5 specimens of any given plant, and those are easily bought), and in TW1 you actually had to learn about the plants to be able to pick them in the first place ;)
Oh well, not to complain about a great game, I just thought it wasn't the best way to handle it.

To get back to the overall topic: I started thinking about games with very simple crafting mechanics, like in The Last of Us... Does this even properly qualify as "crafting", since it's so straightforward and the amount of things you can craft is so limited? If it does count, I thought the crafting worked well for what it was (and at least shivs didn't replenish automatically once you reached a checkpoint ;) ).

I agree.