The current crafting system has all things considered "crafting" become one job where you just prioritize crafting for different characters.  This is less than ideal because you generally don't want characters to go from smithing to tailoring - this is a game where crafting is specialized, so if my smith is done smithing, I want her to go to mining iron or other phys-based jobs, not dabble in wits-based jobs she is thoroughly untrained in doing.  (Especially since you can have a character with 150 phys and 6 wits, with a +125% smithing and +50% collection but only +25% tailoring.) Also, the new version goes back to characters "forgetting" the jobs you manually assigned them if they ever go anywhere.  (In the "Lyra: Origins" bug thread, this was mentioned as a side problem, but it was mentioned as a side-problem, so I didn't think it would be proper to hijack that thread to write a suggestion thread...)  

So after stewing on it a bit, I think the current system is backwards.  Rather than having a complex crafting page where you assign priorities for characters who can do crafting work while you still have to manually assign each task to each character every time anyone moves, if the goal is to minimize micromanagement after you set things up, why not make a per-character job priority menu?  That way, they can carry their job priority queue with them no matter where they go.  The current crafting "continuous crafting" options where you set priority crafting orders, then can set the order to activate/deactivate based upon having a certain amount of the product in inventory is a good system that can serve as a starting point.  Let us give orders like, "chop rough wood if less than 200 rough wood in stock" that can be queued in a character page.  (I'm thinking of this as a new page similar to the current craft menu that you could access through what is now the "occupation" button on each characters' page.)

So, let's say that you set your blacksmith character to have a highest priority as "finish all smithing item jobs," maybe followed by "finish all smithing material jobs," then "upgrading," then "mine mythril until 200," then "mine iron until 200," then maybe "mine stone" as a final line if they have nothing better to do.

You might also want to have an export/import queue option so that you can copy-paste a queue you're comfortable with between characters and even games.

Alternately, you might further centralize tasks with a crafting-like resource collection priority page.  (Possibly as a sub-page from crafting's page.)  That is, the same way that crafting is now just one big job, you might assign someone to "collection jobs" and have a priority list of collection jobs, or a "farming jobs."  (Dividing this by the labor taken is important because classes give bonuses to specific labors.  You only want to assign hunting to your hunters who get a hunting bonus, while you want to avoid giving collection jobs to the character with the clumsy trait that inflicts -80% collection but leaves other labors perfectly fine.)  In this kind of resource priority page, instead of telling each worker to farm grains until 300 is in inventory, you could just set a general "farmers work grains until 300" order placed in a given priority, and assign workers to farming.  This might help avoid having to assign very similar rules to each character who is involved in farming.

A problem that would arise from this is that you'd have several characters fighting for slots, so you'd need to have a priority list for each character.  That is, you probably want your best collector working mythril, then the second-best working iron wood, third-best on obsidian, and so on.  There needs to be a system if there's one mythril mining slot for giving the character you want mining mythril most that slot.  (Presumably looking like all the other priority queues, just you sliding characters up and down priority.)  This might have an auto-sort feature where they just get ranked by who's most productive, but having a manual sorting option may also be useful, especially if you want to have someone who primarily does, say, smithing, but fills in as a mythril miner if nobody else is around, so you want them low on the priority list for mythril even if they're good at it.  If you don't have the resource page mentioned in the previous paragraph, this might need to be a feature of the general "work" page, such as when you select a work type, the character names on the right column become sorted based upon their current priority.

Also, tool sharing should be a part of this.  Until late-game where you can just have 30 of each tool type without thinking about it, you probably want your highest-priority characters using your best tools.  If a character is mining, you don't want them hogging one of your two steel lumber axes while the guys on woodcutting have to go all Minecraft and chop trees with their bare hands.  Again, if the objective is to avoid micromanagement, having characters take the tool they need for their job from inventory when they are assigned to a job, and drop it back off when they're done with it makes the most sense.  There might also be a setting to let the high-priority characters steal the best tool for their job, since you might want the mythril miner to have the mythril pickaxe even if the guy who got bumped down to iron mining got the mythril pickaxe first.

Finally, it might be a good idea to have a way to turn this off and just set orders manually as it is done now.  Especially early on in the game, automation may be more cumbersome than it streamlines, because you need to spend time setting up these priorities and queues.  For new players, it's probably best to just let them do things manually and dip their toes into automating task priorities at their own pace as their mansion grows more populous and the supply chain more complex.