Arenanet went out of their way to have a pretty involved crafting system that allows people to make pretty much any sort of gear in the game. Making that gear uses resources that players can gather out in the wild, and they even have a pretty robust market system you can access from anywhere to buy as sell on.
Yes they completely sabotage the whole thing by having gear drop off mobs.
There's already karma vendors, and white gear, but they destroy their whole economy by just handing out the blues and greens, screw you crafters. Hence, nobody can really be surprised that you lose money by converting materials in to finished items, just like the real world economy would be if cars or other products materialized for free for anyone who wanted one.
All they have to do is stop that one thing and they'd have a really good and interesting economy going, but they insist on sabotaging the whole thing.