Why do mundane crafters exist?

[unseenmage]

...

OK, I'll bite. How did the wizard find an outsider or simulacrum with knowledge of where every town, village and household is, how many people are there, how much food is needed, and exactly where the food can go, along with the technical expertise to run a world-girdling transportation network, the political knowledge of how to prevent the local bullies from seizing the food and using it for tyranny, etc.

I repeat: After you cast all the spells, and create the mountain of food or goods, the work of getting it where it's supposed to go is still a full-time job requiring a level of network theory, operations analysis, and logistics that simply does not exist in such a world.

You cannot just hand-wave away millions of decisions.

Except that you can. You tell your minion to handle it. All of it.
You make a trap of a high enough Simulacrum or similar and you instruct the first to instruct the rest to get it done.
You make a trap that makes minions that make Int Magic Items whose powers and purposes are to create post scarcity.

Maybe every now and then you could spare a precious precious spell slot to look in on the process and tweak it. Oh no. How inconvenient. You've sullied your noble spellcaster's hands with giving an order to a sapient completely obedient and like minded minion.

Spells are like phone apps. You got a problem? The 3.x game has a brute force solution in magic. Not enough info? Divination spells. Not enough man hours? Minionmancy. Your skills not high enough? There's a spell for that.

Heck, with custom spells you get to magic away the minutia of just about any issue. And its supposed to be that way. Why? Same reason you keep stating, This is nominally an adventure game And magic is the device by which we obviate the minutia of the day to day so our table time can focus on monster fights instead.


Speaking of monster fights, you still get them in post scarcity. There's infinite planes full of monsters with opposed ideologies.
Just because the god fearing good folk of the prime material have their needs tended to doesnt mean they'll be perfectly safe all the time. It just means they stop dying of preventable disease, starvation, exposure, and thirst.

And I'm not saying your way of playing is wrong or unfun. Just that the default world of suffering and scarcity doesnt hold up to a rational application of the rules that are supposed to run along side said scarcity.