I followed some of the research done by Wanze and also your posts Mystic, but I’m still confused about the stated rate on the kits. I’d like ANet to chime in and explain what it really means and fix the tooltip or the rates.
You are correct that it’s not worth the hassle if you have lots of gold. I wanted to come up with tipping points in the difference of value of the materials you get and thus which salvage kit would be the best to use on items below Rare quality. Given these findings my math obviously is wrong and given the difference in pricing of the kits it would mean that the crude kit is the only worthwhile for Basic/Fine items and the basic kit whenever there is an upgrade (as even the vendor value of runes/sigils offsets the cost vs the crude kit).
Originally I thought using the Fine kit is better for Heavy L70-80 armor and weapons because of the higher value of Ori/Anchient.