Smithing is completely broken. It breaks the economy with the cost of items you can sell. You have to rest inside a settlement by passing time to recover stamina (there's no other way to do it). Then this "order" system that no one ever asked for. It's a mini-game that's completely left field and barely makes sense in the world of M&B 2. How are you getting the orders? On your smart phone? Is the customer texting you their response? Also why are you working as a blacksmith?
Viking Conquest did a good job of having you find a legendary blacksmith and pay him with currency and materials to make you weapons and armor. I liked that system.
It is a bit broken currently, but I think it is a nice feature that does have a place in the game (or can, given some fixing). To be honest, the only reasonable long-term play style right now, I feel, is the classic vassalage style. Join a kingdom or create your own, play the lord game.
You *can* be a criminal, but there doesn't seem to be much point in it; you make more money and have an easier time if you just play as a legitimate lord (which is kind of counter-intuitive, since a life of crime is generally taken up due to its accessibility and ease of entry, as opposed to being nobility which is... pretty exclusive).
You *can* play as a merchant, but you can also largely do that as a lord, which again, has other benefits.
You *can* be a smith, which partly falls into the merchant line and has the same caveats.
I have no problem with having support for multiple playstyles. Really, the game needs that for replayability (though you'd hardly guess that based on my 600 hours in the game so far and dozens of campaigns...). The problem is that mostly it just supports one or two right now, with others being pretty shallow and pointless. Speaking of smithing, to get back on topic, I think the orders system is nice, just needs some more work. Obviously they need to fix the main problem of unpredictable outcomes, but they should also add more in-world interaction for it (as with many aspects of the game, really).
Actually, I was going to go into more detail, but maybe I'll just make a separate post in suggestions or something. Suffice it to say for now that orders do make sense as a concept and do add something to the game, I think. They just need to be expanded a bit.