Is Harvest crafting actually good? Or even OP?

So when it comes to the crafting options Harvest offers a lot of people are calling it good or even OP. The "OP crafting" of harvest is something a lot of players are dropping in their texts without telling what exactly is so good about the crafting. I am wondering: What am i missing? In my opinion there are three major flaws that causes me not to like Harvest at all:

1) Most of the time Harvest crafting comes down to a free use of an alch or chaos. The really interesting crafting options, such as "remove XYZ" modifier and "add XYZ modifier" are way too rare. Without these options, there is really no difference between Harvest and using a fossil. However, Fossils are not only used to target craft specific modifiers, but also to block unwanted modifiers, which is not possible with Harvest. So once again: Currently this feels like free alchs and chaos spent on items. Nothing special. The chances to remove modifier and augment items must be increased heavily.

2) GGG keeps driving their wording with "defense modifier", "attack modifier" and so on. As far as i know, there is no option to see in game how a modifier is tagged? Yeah, most of the time its kinda obvious. But my point still stands: Why are the modifier tags not visible in game, and someone needs to rely on 3rd party websites like poe.db? Or is this my fault because this option does exist and i dont know where i can see it?

3) I have no idea why the harvest crafting option differentiate between "chaos" and "alch + scour" mechanic. Once i made my item rare, a lot of the crafts are not possible anymore because they require the item to be normal. The problem is: There is no stash in my garden! So why not just keep it simple and let harvest crafting always completely reforge the item? Imho this makes no sense

To your last point. Yiu can access stash from garden craft window

you can access items, not currency orbs

People have found some clever-seeming opportunities. If I understood the process right, you can use the "remove 1 X type and replace it with 1 X type" to force triple T1 resist, T1 life, and I -think- elemental damage with weapons on belts by starting blank and using benchcrafts. So you can obtain triple resist and other cases where only 1-2 mods of a given type exist on an item almost purely deterministically.

E.g. start with boots with 30-35% movespeed. Craft +1 maximum life. Spam remove-Life-add-Life seed until you get T1 Life. Rinse and repeat with +1% resists -> T1 resists. You now have 5xT1 boots.

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Sollkomol wrote:

you can access items, not currency orbs

You can definitely access currency orbs too, at least for the purpose of sacrificing. You can't withdraw or use them if you want to, for example, scour an item before using a craft, though.

I got a 5 link pretty early on in SSF act 4 by using my farm. I've rarely had anything better than a 4-link chest piece without trading in past leagues.

In that regard I feel like it tilts toward being OP. As far as the other recipes, I'm not deep enough to comment on it. However I do think it's nice to be able to target an off color socket and change it directly.

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Sollkomol wrote:

The really interesting crafting options, such as "remove XYZ" modifier and "add XYZ modifier" are way too rare.

I don't think you fully understand how powerful these crafts are, when you combine them with the other sources of crafting we have. I don't feel I'm required to use examples here. Use your imagination. But there should maybe have been more of these crafts on low(er)-ilvl weapons.

When it comes to the "regular" crafting options from Harvest, I do somewhat agree with you. I'm not "blown away" either. I have this linked mace I've been trying to craft on, and I think I've used 100-200 of the "...Including a physical modifier" craft on it, without ONE single decent outcome.

This league needs to compete with standard type mirror worthy items.
And after the conqueror orbs were introduced, they became pretty damn insane.
So no, this league's crafting system can't outperform standard.
So playing the league itself is literally worse than playing standard.

Its very good under the right circumstances, targeted annuls and add a specific category mod are extremely strong and remove a full tier of difficulty from crafting an item.

The rarity of those is pretty high though and a vast majority is just free chaos spam, which is OK but not really that exciting.