Crate buff ideas to catch up with inflation:

Old balenos crate x5 ash plywood x5 maple plywood and base price 110,340

New balenos crate x10 ash plywood x10 maple plywood and base price 230,000

Old calpheon crate x5 birch plywood x5 cedar plywood x5 fir plywood and base price 197,280

New calpheon crate x10 birch plywood x10 cedar plywood x10 fir plywood and base price 415,000

Idk maybe something like this? nothing too crazy, just making thrifty skills viable for lvl 1 crate workshops. 

Raising prices doesn't actually do anything useful for the player trading, it's happened a couple times in the past already.  At best, the  few people processing their own stuff get a insignificant amount of daily increase from what their workers bring in.  More likely they'll just spend the time fishing because PA made that too OP for the effort and attention it needs.

In reality it just means people can pay more and more for the plywood until they are making the same money then as they are content to do so now.  Only way it'd work for the traders themselves is if the prices went so high everything hit the CM market cap prices, in which case it wouldn't matter because you wouldn't be abvle to get any plywood anyway.

The major difficulty trading faces is how cumberous processing is, because, while with a pearl shop costume you can process out of storage you can't process back into storage. This means that, if you have good mastery, the amount of time you can actually afk process for is very short, unless you spend RL money buying a vast amount of weight. People don't do much processing because you make a lot less silver processing than fishing or other afk/semi-afk activities. People who like to make crates will do it even if they make little to no money because it is the main method of leveling trading to high levels, and also because crate enthuasists like making crates for its own sake, even though other activities of all kinds make much more silver per hour.

I do crates for fun. I like the idea and the process. But the income is insignificant. You get more exp than money. I still continue doing them just because I like it. Giving them a raise in price would not be wrong - or give better scaling with mastery while bargaining (more mastery = more money, but with better scaling than now).