Did you know - most orbs are just glorified scrolls of wisdom?

Orbs of Transumation, Augmentation, Alchemy, Regal, and Exalted are all just scrolls of wisdom that take up additional inventory space.

They literally don't do anything but let you know what stats your gear has.

Why doesn't this game implement a crafting system?

Get rid of these worthless orbs, once you identity an item it should show you all stats of the item.

You should now have ways of changing some of the stats on your item via "crafting"

Why is this hard?

This is actually really hilarious way to see it. But it is not really true.

Take the Orb of transmutation, for example. Your claim is kind of a Philosophical view, that all the Orb is doing is reveal the first affix of the item. And that it would be the same if you just identified a rare item. But that's not true. Even white items already have bifurcations in their path to becoming another kind of gear. You can get a Transmutation and let it pick a random affix. OR you can use an essence OR you can chance it. This means that transmutation is already a choice you are making in regards to how to craft the item.

Now, you could argue that Augmentation is the real case of just identify. And that all magical items could as well just have 2 affixes already. But this is not exactly true. The thing about Augmentation is that it allows you to decide which items should keep moving forward in the later and which items should probably be reforced or disenchanted. If you have tons of Augmentation orbs, then it might always be better to augment just in case. But it IS more expensive if you decide to augment an item that definitely rolled something that's not useful for you in its first transmutation.

The typical case would be if you are a wand/staff wizard or witch. Attack modifiers are completely useless. If transmutation or essence created an attack property, then you can skip augmentation altogether.

Magic items with two affixes once again give you the chance to go with random Regal Orb or to crop the possibilities a bit with a Greater Essence.