Ah ok, the description made it seem like it was only raw ingredients.

It does. I get them all the time. Upgrade mats as well as basic refined mats, style mats, and traits gems.

Oddly, I find hirelings to be worth more for the points investment tho I'm actual returns. The lack of success in getting an upgrade mat from a blue+ decon with 3/3 for all 3 crafts is kind of disturbing.

Get both, ideally. I held out on hirelings till very recently because it struck me as a gimmicky luxury purchase and doing all 3 armor weapons crafts had me tight with points. I've been very impressed with it though. You're still going to want the deconones tho.

Agreed, extraction skills definitely increase the likelihood of extracting tempers.

It improves your chances on both refining raw materials and deconstructing items.
without 3 points there it's impossible to get yellow temper, and even blue and purple are VERY hard to get if you don't have 3 points there (in purple's case, you get like every 5th deconstruct of purple item)