How my armor I create my with gm smith/miner never come out with my maker's mark on it (yes i have .makersmark enabled).

Back b4 this it would always put my name on it, now it's just random... crafted by an expert, adept, blah blah blah, it never says my name on it.

the changelog explains how the makersmark works, and how it's not entirely random...

but.....quality of items made by a GM smith has dropped to about half of what it was before the patch.

I'm all for making things better, but when one thing is changed for the better, and another changed for the worse, it kind of makes the change a wash, and in the end we didn't really make any advancements.

This was intentional, and here's my reasoning why.
GM quality was rather mundane for a lot of items, and was assumed to be the norm rather than a rarity.
It is now going to become a rarity for higher quality items, while easy items will almost all be masterwork.

However i've also given you a method of producing a higher % of master quality items, if you're willing to sacrifice the resources for them.
By cancleing an item mid-make, you can give up some resources but save the rest.
So if you get a really bad first strike on a really good suit of armor, you might want to cancle it and start over, increasing your chance of getting a masterwork item.