Crafting your own gear on your first/main toon is almost never worth it. Mainly because you level up much more quickly than you rank up your crafting skills. Especially with researching traits requiring so much time.

Crafting gear for self sufficiency while leveling is really only useful for equipping alts.

Once you hit CP 160, you’ll stop outgrowing gear as that’s the maximum level of gear. At this point you can work on putting a build together. For additional characters, you can craft “training gear” (training trait, I use the crafted set Heartland Conquerer) for a handful of levels (like lvl 1, lvl 20, lvl 40) to help them level to 50 faster (CP level is account wide and so additional characters will snap to your CP level once they hit level 50).

CP160+ is the maximum gear level. And once you hit it on one character, all other characters will start at that same level once they also reach CP level.

You can then craft your own gear if you want. A lot of the better gear comes from group content but there are some good crafted sets. I would still craft it though to get some gear that will group content feel worth doing, if that's your thing.

You can also get a guild mate to craft one for you as the amount of traits you know on a piece also determines which sets you can make. At your level, you probably can't craft much.

Let's differentiate on this. Crafting is a major activity for me, but it's almost completely dailies and Master Writs. Personal-use crafting is a very small part of what I do, but all of my characters ran crafted set gear until I had a good enough stock of transmute crystals (and a reasonably full stickerbook) to make non-craftable sets a major component of my character builds.

The glorious part of craftable sets is that you don't have to farm them. It doesn't get any better than make the piece you want at the level you want in the trait you want at the quality you want. You don't have to offer prayers to the RNG gods and you don't have to beat the same bosses over and over and over (and over) to get a particular piece. Are craftable sets the best sets in the game? Hardly. If they were, there would be no reason to be doing dungeons or trials or arenas or whatever. But craftable sets can be decently good and you always get exactly what you want. Style is mostly irrelevant; costumes cover a multitude of fashion disasters and outfit stations can cover the rest.

My first character pretty much ran with whatever dropped while they did the trait research. Second and later characters got crafted set gear. This usually happened at Level 16 (a cheap materials transition point), somewhere between the mid-30s and mid-40s (tide you over until I can make you permanent gear), and CP160. Early sets were blue quality since that gear was either going to be deconned or used for trait research. Mid-level gear was usually purple because the slog from 40 to 50 is about as long as the slog from 1 to 40 and it needed to hold for a while. CP160 gear was usually gold (purple if I was running low on gold mats and I'd upgrade it later). Only the first character needed to endure the hump from CP10 to C160; everyone else jumped to CP160+ when they hit Level 50.

Once you hit cp160 you can start checking out builds online. Depending on what type of content you participate in, crafted gear might be perfectly fine. Also, the stickerbook, the part of your Collections where it shows Sets, will allow you to recreate dropped gear you have already sold or deconstructed at any level (except monster helms from group dungeons which are always cp160) by using transmute stones from various sources like random daily dungeons or PvP. So, there are many options that use crafting to some degree.

There are crafted sets that have been good to use in the past like Druid’s Braid, Night Mother’s Gaze, Hunding’s Rage, Julianos, etc. The list of best sets is always changing as the game changes from one update to the next.