The point is, you don't need tailoring on your alt any more than you need enchanting on your alt. You can get the stuff tailored from anyone. You might as well take whatever two professions seem fun to you, since they all provide more or less comparable stats bonuses.

The notion that it would be gamebreaking for you to have 2-3 slots of craftable BoP gear that you could upgrade over time that are profession specific is just flat out wrong. Blizzard seems incapable of grasping the difference between making Stormherald and Frozen Shadoweave less good and simply taking the relevance of professions out of the game completely. They have chosen the latter, for whatever reason.

Their "logic" here is that Stormherald or Fireguard/Blazeguard forced everyone to be a blacksmith. If those weapons were a bit less good and the isntances actually dropped enough weapons (SSC, ahem), people wouldn't have >>needed<< to be blacksmiths, but they could have chosen to. And FSW, was simple to fix. Make it solid, limit it to three slots (as it was) and allow it to be upgraded over time (like the engineering helms). As we all know, it was just too good at the beginning such that people were wearing it into Black Temple.

If leatherworking, blacksmithing, tailoring, jewelcrafting, engineering, all had those 2-3 excellent slots, someone needs to enlighten me on how this would "force" anyone to do anything.. It simply wouldn't. People could choose. Or they could -- in fact -- opt out, since none of the gear would be irreplaceable by gear in the relevant raid tier. The craftables would be more or less tier 7 quality at first, just available without waiting out the drop. To get them to tier 8 level wouldn't be possibly pre-Ulduar. Etc. etc. The opt-out crowd would wait a tad longer to get into the raid zone and get their drops.

As it stands now, virtually everything is an alt profession unless you are really a min-maxer who is essentially hair splitter over which effectively non-differentiated stat bonus is slightly better for you. That makes all professions essentially the same and -- well -- fits with the model of non-differentiated classes. And it isn't really a good thing.

I'm not sure why you think enchanting is ahead. JC and BS are the two which give a choice of stats which allows them to come out ahead even though the strict itemization value benefit is the same (LW is ahead for tanks as well due to the stam fur lining). The ring enchants are for AP, spellpower and stam. The numbers on them are the same as what you get from inscription and LW for AP and spellpower, and the stam benefit is weaker than what you get from LW- you would get the same itemization value in dodge from inscription.

The profession benefit breakdown to me looks like this:

Strong benefit: JC, BS, LW (tanks only)
Medium benefit: LW (non-tanks), Inscription (note dodge instead of stam for tanks), Enchanting, Mining (tanks only)
Weak benefit: Tailoring, Engineering, Alchemy (on par with the medium benefits for AP/spellpower but only in effect when flask/elixir applied, especially weak for tanks), Skinning, Herbalism

Note that of the gathering professions, mining is still good enough to be on par with the medium benefit professions for tanks, skinning is weak but provides some dps benefit (arguably more than tailoring or engineering), and herbalism is pretty much useless compared to the others, although the heal can be handy. Gathering professions should be weak though, as they provide a lot of monetary gain, I sure hope Blizz isn't leaving engineering weak because they think of it as a gathering profession.

I would consider Engineering to be more of a casual profession, not meant for raiding but instead for making "cool" items which one can amuse them self with. The Mote Extractor is nice though, I hope the goggles are upgradable.

According to thottbot the range is 45 yards.

On a more general note: I found it strange that the tracking wasn't given as a baseline ability when creating the mote extractor, I guess the belt enchant is a nice fix for it, but they could just allow us to buy a book somewhere or get it from a quest rather than this (new belt? Go and get the skill again or carry a "junk" item around like you do now with the engineering head if you got ~T5/6ish gear).