May I ask why the Skill Cap is so low? Its 500, so if you have a weapon, shield, any armor that’s 300 if you wanna do any crafting you have to sacrifice pretty much anything else.
(1) Shields are terrible. I really recommend that you do not use them.
(2) No one should be able to craft everything, or else they can be a solo player. Crafting is intended to force mechanically-inclined players to seek out other players instead of just murdering their way through mobs.
Shields aren’t terrible. They’re actually well balanced. Rather, weapons/attacks are overpowered. That’s always sort of been a problem though, even in vanilla NWN / 3.5 D&D. It’s far too easy to destroy an opponent in two or three hits with an optimum combat build. Kind of hard to have epic battles like that. 
Force powers are also kinda OP. Even palpatine couldn’t oneshot luke with his lightning. One-shotting with regular force powers should not be a thing