I didn't play beta much, but blacksmithing does seem slower than it was. I have no complaints about it, just something I noticed.

Deconstructing anything you personally made is very little gain. Trade with a friend and break their item and you will get a lot more... or put it in your bank for an alt. You gain little inspiration from seeing how you made the item and it is intended to help trading and social aspects of the game as well as limit power leveling the skills.

Thank you for the info, didn't think on trading crafted items between other crafter.

I have the same feeling. Did not go as far as to write down the numbers and check the difference, but I do struggle more with metalsmithing as compared to clothes and wood items. I was levelling all 3 professions in parallel on the same character and trying to reach level 8 when research of two traits simultaneously becomes available. From normal gameplay I saw that clothing and woodworking were almost at lvl8 while blacksmithing barely reached lvl

What I did was: I made a few small alts of different races and crafted a lot of iron daggers using the racial stones stored in the bank. Then my main character deconstructed all those daggers (they count as if they were made by other person... well, different alt is a different virtual person, isn't he?) and reached lvl8 as well. After that I became more relaxed and metalsmithing is again hanging behind.