You most definelty upped the grind, and damn well meant to. The recipes tell us your intent clearly. You doubled and tripled the mat requirements on many recipes. You could have made recipes more complex but reduced the amounts to offset the complexity, but you didn’t. You just added the the additional requirements in and multiplied the input mats. Congrats you made the game even less fun to play. Players are understandably leaving because of it.
Every time to up the grind you drive away more builders and attract stat whores, and at the very core of what mmo is it all still revolvers around being a voxel building game. Drive away the builders and there won’t be nice stuff to look at.
The idea was put forward to use crappy materials instead in voice last night. Which lead to the coining of the phrase. “Boundless build what you can not what you want.”