Let's talk about in-world crafting (and maybe change it for some?)

In-world crafting, like the creation of stripped logs, carved pumpkins, and concrete, is very immersive and creative.  However, it has its pros and cons.

In-world crafting is the most natural when you can always just transform it in its final position.  Stripped logs are a great example of this since you can just place them as logs and then strip them after.  The issues come when the two materials have different properties (concrete), the crafting method is not precise (concrete), or the resulting product is used in a crafting recipe (carved pumpkins).

Concrete can’t simply be transformed in its final position because concrete powder is a gravity block, so there are situations where you might want to use concrete where you cannot place the powder.  The method of change, placing water, is also very difficult to control and can be very destructive.  An errant placement of water can transform concrete that you want to keep as powder, destroy a redstone mechanism, or wash away torches and make your build site a mob spawner.

Carved pumpkins are a problem because their most useful form involves picking them back up and crafting them with a torch.  About the only reasonable method of making Jack o’Lanterns with this form of crafting is to use the shears on the pumpkin while it is still on the vine.  This basically makes any form of auto-harvest moot and requires you to know what you’re going to be using the pumpkin for before you harvest it.

Basically, any time in-world crafting forces you to place a block, do something to it, and then pick it back up, is not a good use of in-world crafting.

My best idea for concrete is to allow it to be changed as entities rather than blocks.  I wouldn’t mind having to hydrate the blocks if it only involved dumping the items in a body of water and picking them up again.  It might also work to have a recipe where they’re crafted with a bucket of water, but that would be very tedious if it consumed the water. (thanks to MacchuPicchu96 for the latter idea)

As for carved pumpkins and Jack o’Lanterns, you could add a crafting recipe where you combine a pumpkin and shears and get back a carved pumpkin and shears.  Another option that MacchuPicchu96 came up with is to make the conversion to the Jack o’Lantern also an in-world recipe, where clicking on a carved pumpkin with a torch would transform the carved pumpkin into a Jack o’Lantern.  This would solve the problem by making it so you can do all the crafting in the final position.