As ore has Selentine to Theyril, herbs have Steedgrass, the other gathering types should have rare rewards as well.

Timbercutting should be an obvious one. Green leaf. Of various kinds, even if the upper types are exceptionally rare,  How can we not, as timbercutters, come across a single green leaf?

Stone should have various quartz types. Brownie's and Golems had to get theirs from somewhere, right? I realize gems drop, but they do off ore as well, and have little value, or utility.

Fishing. Again, this should be obvious, but rare drops of Seaweed. Also, maybe boots, but that one is negotiable.

Digging. Again, I realize this is used for T-maps, but randomly digging all over the map should have something special pop up on occasion.

Fix altfall

Auto-afk gathering is a dumb mechanic anyway and has no gameplay

I was never a fan of AFK harvesting.

UW tested active harvesting for a while. Concept was simple, you go to a node and you rapidly empty it, quality of items and quantity per swing were decided by the rank of tool you used (A Theyril pickaxe yielded quite good results). It also indirectly provided more prowess due to the faster harvesting rates.

Harvesting raids in danger zone 5 areas became an actual thing for a while (these were located in the center as well as 1 per sub-continent). Keep in mind UW had what the OP is asking for; rares in each harvesting skill, including leather skinning. Hell, even digging had value, as you could dig up fossils.

But then for some reason they decided to listen to... You know what, I still do not know who they decided to listen to for the last few patches the game received. They got a bit weird, they added reagents back for casting spells for no reason, they made AFK harvesting a thing again by removing the active harvesting option, they fucked up mob loot dramatically by making bosses spawn outdoors and what not, and they undid the ice sliding/melee sync fix... Aaah, rant mode off. Point being, UW had active harvesting working, and it was even fun - but it needs to be paired with "high harvest quality regions" of some sort.

Edit: Oh I remember, Axilmar was in his "Lets make UW into DF1 because all these DF1 fans want DF1 back" phase. The changes made no sense for UW and should never have been done. I think he meant well, but it didn't really help the game.

I'm not suggesting anything as drastic. And autoharvesting or not is ok with me. just adding realistic bonus items to each gathering. I don't miss miss the essences or motes, or whatever they were called, but no leaves from trees? just balance them all is what i mean. I gather a lot because I craft a lot and it makes sense to me. And seriously, no seaweed? I could see making it steedgrass rare, but none unless u have an advanced ship and ship box? hell, add a new ocean bottom node, let me cast gills and go gather it like chaos chests work.