This post makes me think of 2 Nice systems ive seen.
In Project Gorgon there are bullitin boards. There are npc generates ones and player generates ones where you are to gather a set number of crafting material or Food or what ever. Turn it in to a shipsmaster and get rewarded. A waorkorder cannot be repeated more than ones a week, it does not give xp, only income and it works as a normal quest but with its own subcategory.
This way People can make workorders and People get paid. In PG this is a skill called "Industry" that you level when you make them. They are weekly and to get paid well you need to do high level work orders and to get higher level you need to start with simple workorders. The npc generates ones are there to create paddling so People can level even thought there are no player workorders out in lowlvl content.
In a game that has zone/player levels in a more classic way there would be no need to level a seperate skill for workorders. But it could be a fun addion to daily work to help woth your own wallets and others crafting and farming. With or without skill level I still think having npc generated ones will make work orders a good activity to earn money and have something simple to do on those afternoon we are waiting for our friends to log on.
Another one I keep thinking about is guild wars 2 daily/weekly system. It wasent quests. It was like Daily achivements. You did like 3-5. Then there was weekly ones aswell.
Personaly I felt the weekly one was more intresting and gave blue collar workers with kids a more balanced way of getting repwteble stuff.
Daily is a system that can be tedious and Many might feel like they loose out. Weekly stuff is more attaineble and in a way alot more fair.
Weekly achivements where both gathering/pve/pvp/wxploration based and was greatly rewarded when completed.
These are systems I think we can look at and learn alot from. Maybe Im wrong. But I think its some intresting things to consider.
Never played Project Gorgon, but I played a lot of GW2 and their daily/weekly achievement system is great.
I'm a working Dad of 2 kids and the daily achievements were really easy to make.
The idea is for all players to get an achievement from all types of gameplay activities, PvP, PvE, Jumping puzzles, WvW, and World Events. Of course, they were easy to make because many people gather and help each other to complete the activities faster. I can safely say that it took me like 40min to complete most of the achievements that are needed to get the "Daily Completionist" one.
Weekly quests will be nice for sure, you can stay relevant even if you play only on the weekends.