What could've made Crucible better

When I first read about the league mechanics I thought GGG would let one of the vendor npc take on the leading npc roll and offer us an option to do some research in order to open up a strong furnace/forge so we can craft even better and stronger weapons/armours;

A familiar face who get more valued is always fun. And it saves precious time instead of making up a new charachter who might not be added to core later on.

The channeling idea between passives but I would like to see a long term process which could be to research into a stronger forge/furnace or open up the possibility to choose between 1-3 passives at first or simply open the passive tree.
This would not be fun to racers but to the more casual people who likes to invest the few hours every week especially when the leagues are 4 months.

The vendor could give us a pointer what kind of maps (temples, graveyards, forests etc) would open up different research points (or maybe addons to the forge) just like Kirac did when we would chase the Warlords of the Atlas. Giving this league a more rewarding grinding.

Please contiune this thread with more constructive ideas :)

I just wanted to make exactly the same title to a post but with different suggestions. so i decided to add to your post if you don't mind.

People complain about how hard it is and it is compared to the rest of the map content. On the other hand it gives a lot of power and therefore should be a challenge.

I would like the idea that the final map boss drops some kind of anvil, that allows you to open a different area (maybe based on sarn arena?) where you can forge the tree on items.

This would allow to postpone the interaction with the league mechanic and disconnect the difficulty from the map. It could copy the mapmods on the Anvil as well and male it corrupted if the difficulty should also depend on that.

This could allow for tradeable anvils (optional).

This would allow for league integration into the core game in interesting ways other than 10% chance to appear in a map.

Most importantly it would not make the rest of the map way easier than the encounter.