I heartily dislike this current tune to gem cutting. It makes cutting gems
for customers, to use in zap gauntlet, gemplate, gemfire, ring making, etc
very difficult. I do recgonize the reason it was implemented, but it is
a rather brute force approach. I've been thinking on this lately, and I've
come up with an idea that (seems to me) isn't horrendously hard to code
and would require a change in the gem cutting skill rather than values of
gems or shop code. So, that being said, here is what I have come up with.

Every time you cut a gem, you get a marker (in a shadow or however you want
to do it). Once you get to 5 markers you start to get some eye fatigue.
This fatigue would increase every 5 markers, making it more and more
difficult to cut the higher quality gems. Also the higher your fatigue
level, the faster the markers would accumulate. However, there is also
a cooldown component to this. Every 3 to 5 minutes, one of those fatigue
markers would drop off, which means even if you hardcore did gem cutting
and built up a large fatigue debt, over time, it would reduce and you'd
be able to cut nicer gems again. I envision a progression something along
the following lines...

Level 0 fatigue (1-5 gems cut), 1 marker added per gem cut
Level 1 fatigue (6-10 gems cut), 2 markers added per gem cut
Level 2 fatigue (11-15 gems cut), 3 markers added per gem cut

and so forth. Of course, with the cooldown component, over time you could
come back to your forges and continue to cut gemstones, but you wouldn't
be able to mass produce high quality gems quickly.

It would also be nice to have this eye fatigue to show up in something like
aura detection or so, maybe jesters trivia, so we could find out if that
fatigue still exists.

Anyway, thats my idea on tuning gem cutting to be more sane for merchants
to be able to have it as a viably useful skill again.

--Hair