forgive me if this has been suggested somewhere already.

It would be pretty nice if there was somewhere you could craft UVs for a premium. Not craft weapons with a chance at UVs but randomly craft the UVs themselves, and then they could be combined to weapons or armors of your choice. Again, this would require a considerable amount of Energy/Crowns/Mats, but it'd be a good "sink" and one that people would use like crazy.

Weather or not the UVs came bound or not, well, that could be to the dev's
to decide. It could be fairly expensive, but on the whole cheaper than the cost of crafting 10 weapons to get one UV (assuming the 1/10 ratio is accurate), plus the benefit of adding it to whatever piece you wanted. Also, for those with full 5* gear, it would give them something more productive feeling to do than start crafting new gear they don't particularly need.

on a second thought, make it a little cheaper but make the UV upgrades bound to the crafter. B/c if not, the market would be flooded with low UVs that were crafted and discarded...ridiculously flooded.