[FireballWilson]

My suggested changes to the Jewelry crafting tree of skills.

Resource gathering IE Sand/Clay
It's not terrible once the skill is high enough.
Change:
It'd be nice though to generate extra resources/pile randomly similar to how miners can get an extra ore or two randomly.

Incidental use of alchemy
This step in and of itself is not terrible, and having the rest of it locked behind alchemy makes for a fine dynamic. The problem only really comes from the fact that you will be needing HUNDREDS of crafting operations in order to get anywhere close to competent at the higher end. If you don't have at-least three magical bags full of grits, you can just forget about tumbling.
Change:
It should have an "auto crafting" button like ceramics. Not necessary, but a quality of life improvement by a mile.

Tumbling
Welcome to the FIRST bottle-neck. Every crafting operation takes near exactly 30 seconds to complete, meaning a single stack of 10 gems takes 5 minutes to complete. The process is not automatic either, requiring you to pay attention (or set up a rather complex macro) in order to properly progress the crafting operation. The success chance is also exceedingly low, and resource intensive for those who have no skill, meaning you will be dumping HOURS into tumbling before you receive ANY substantial quantity of workable materials.
Change:
Put on an "auto tumble" button that will tumble rough gems endlessly until stopped. The tumbler can also tumble polished gems to make gem-dust, and if you wish to keep that element, make a seperate auto-tumble for tumbling polished gems into dust.

Gemcutting
Oh, you thought tumbling was bad, this is EVEN WORSE! Welcome to the tumbling step after the tumbling step. You process each gem 1 at a time and if you don't make an exceptional quality gem it's ABSOLUTELY USELESS FOR THE NEXT STEP. All the Non-exceptionals you form are near worthless as well, selling for a varying range of 1-30 gold each depending on gem quality and cutting quality (1-5 gold being the average). This step is EXCEPTIONALY hard to grind as well since it has both a slow progression and a HEAVY timecost/operation. (On average, assuming high tumbling skill, it's about 1 minute 30 seconds per operation if you include the prerequisite tumbling time)
Change:
You don't need a quality scale (poor/average/exceptional) on this step because you either fail to make anything valuable, or you make something of value. Change the gems crafted to be the same as the ones you find in dungeons and adventuring; no quality, different item ID, sell able at 20-30% value, and purchasable at a high price. This means that you could use these steps to produce some workable quantity of money as well as it allows gems you find in the wild to ACTUALLY BE USABLE IN JEWELRY CRAFTING! as well as allowing the various gem selling NPCs to ACTUALLY HAVE A PURPOSE!

Jewelry crafting
This too suffers from the gem-cutting "quality" problem where you can produce a resource, but if it's anything but exceptional, it's worthless.
Change:
To account for the change to gem-cutting, you'll need to allow this to accept the changed item IDs for the crafting processes. The actual station itself should ALSO receive the same treatment gem-cutting did, in changing the crafted rings, necklaces, and amulets, to become the standard items you find in the world. Allowing for the purchasing of necklaces and rings from merchants, and selling of such items at reasonable price. This doesn't need an "improvement to skill learning speed" as you can readily train your skill in it with a pile of clay and iron.

Blowing
Blowing is perfect, the auto-smelting feature is an absolute god-send.

There are also minor balance changes or tweaks that might be nice for the various materials used. Mithril could use a much better property for example and shadow Iron's given property is a LITTLE too good.

If you trust me with it, I wish to take a look at the core scripts for the crafting elements. I've poked around using the HakPack editor among the user files and I have to figure that the scripts are a server-side element. If you let me, I'd like to poke around in the files myself to see if I can help in some manner.