The main differences between the books:
-Always-on enchanted items
-The "Lethal Weapon" stunt gets completely negated by any armor in the old book, whereas in the new one it gets incrementally negated.
Regarding the topic:
-Crafting does have one major advantage: Your Conviction skill becomes completely irrelevant for the purposes of Weapon rating. A Weapon:6 attack with 3x/session takes 2 enchanted item slots at crafting complexity 6 (easily doable with Lore 5 and a specialization/focus), and can be aimed by either Discipline or Weapons. The latter makes it a melee attack, but Strength powers apply, so ymmv. The tradeoff is: your accuracy cannot be enhanced by foci, so you cap at your maximum skill rating, whereas an evoker can easily get skill+3 at chargen.
-You don't actually need Always-on items. If an item runs out of uses, you can still use it by inflicting 1 mental stress on yourself. My Shield Bracer (Block:6/Armor:3 3x/session) has proven handy in games, and thus far, I've run out of uses twice.