After playing a LOT of Skyrim and a fair chunk of Reckoning I'm finding a similar issue. The loot you find is never as good as what you can enchant or craft, however I did enjoy making and enchanting some awesome gear in Skyrim and seeing how far I could abuse it (you can boost your damage output to crazy amounts).

Would these games have been better to just not have crafting options so loot becomes more fun or do you think they benefited from these systems?

I hate dealing with crafting and alchemy, but literally last night I was thinking about how glad I am that those things are there. The thing is, if they aren't powerful then they'll never get used.

Not really, it offers different play-styles for people. For example in my Skyrim experience I never once went and crafted something, instead simply using what I found in treasure chests and stuff. I much prefer the option be there though. What people find "fun" with their loot gathering experience always varies so having the choice to do what you want is nice.

No. In skyrim early game random crap is way more powerfull then stuff you craft your self.

Overall I did enjoy Skyrim more because I could craft cool stuff, it was fun seeing what I could make. I think they could probably balance it a bit better though.

Also I found low level enchanting kind of pointless as you got like 1% bonuses to things. So I ended grinding it so I could get 50% bonuses.

I'd like it if the loot dropping was better. I spent around 5 hours with each piece of equipment in Reckoning before finding something new (been playing 20 hours) and have yet to find a complete set of armour.
 
I guess what I'd like is more unique (like gold items in Diablo 2, pre-made stuff) loot and less random loot.

I only craft to make hide bracers to grind my smithing skill for experience.

Im not sure I mean if the games that had it made it much more difficult to get materials then maybe it would be more interesting. Like wow for instance in order to get some of the really good gear from crafting you had to either buy some extremely expensive materials from auction or raid in order to get them. Or thats how it used to be. I dont think that you should be able to get amazing gear for crafting something that takes barely any effort. Like in Skyrim you could get dragon armor super easy and it really took very little time to do it. I mean I dropped more dragon bones than I ever sold or used.