Read through the jewelry crafting and initially was like ok seems good. Then i learned more and was like ok seems like some work but ok. Then did some math, realized we have some problems.

The gold plating dust comes from refining seam ore and deconstructing gold jewelry, 1 dust chance per gold jewelry deconstructed or per 10 seam ore refined. 10 dust equals 1 gold plating if im understanding this right.

Ok so deconstructing gold jewelry best case scenario: 1 dust drops for every deconstructed gold jewelry piece.

-you will need to deconstruct 240 gold jewelry to upgrade 1 full set of jewelry to gold
-your not going to do this with expensive jewelry so your going to do trials
-lets go for an easy trial, vhrc. lets say you have a VERY good group and can get vhrc done in 20 min, 15 ish mins below the speed run time.
-20 mins * 240 = 4800 min, 4800min /60 in an hr = 80 hrs
- 80 hrs of just running trials non stop with an extremely good group to gold out 1 set of jewelry. THATS 3.3 DAYS OF GAMPLAY FOR 1 SET OF JEWELRY
And i remind you this is the BEST 1 dust per jewelry scenario

Alright so lets look at refining seam ore: with max typical crafting passives refining will give me 1-2 temps, wax or rosin per 200 raw mats
- so again i need 80 dust per jewelry piece to get the 8 gold plating i need, 80 * 3 again is 240
- lets use best case scenario again and say i get 2 dust per stack of 200 ore
- 240/2= 120 stacks
- 120*200= 24,000 raw seam ore
- i get between 3-8 raw mat per node, so lets average it 5.5, round up to 6 (being nice here)
- 24,000/ 6= 4000 seams you have to harvest.
- 4000 seams nodes you have to harvest in a world with tons of hopeful farmers, crafters and ppl trying get mats for their new crafted jewelry sets

If that number isnt ridiculous enough for you lets do a time frame on that. Again BEST CASE SCENARIO for farming. There is a place in wrothgar were i can get around 200 leather in 1 hr
-24,000 leather / 200 = 120 stacks
-120 stacks / 1 stack an hr = 120 hr
-120hrs / 24 hrs in a day = 5 days of game play to farm a set of gold jewelry mats
- and this is leather, not nodes like seams. quickly respawning adds

lets look at an example with nodes, i have a place full of ancestor silk, with NO OTHER FARMERS, i can get about 200 in 2 hrs. so 100 per hr, .5 stacks per hr
- we need 120 stacks for our jewelry set
- 120 stacks / .5 stacks per hr = 240 hrs
- 240 hrs/ 24 hrs in a day = 10 days of gameplay farming

In all of these i have tried to be fair, use the best case scenarios. 1 dust per jewelry deconstruction (this doesnt always happen with existing craft deconstruction with max passives). 2 dust per stack of raw mats (again some times you get 0 per stack with existing crafting mat refinement with max passives). Used real eso examples from my best farming spots for my most efficient mats per hr and for crafting nodes under ideal "i am the only farmer there" scenarios (these are with known locations with a large amount of animals/nodes to harvest, we do not know where large concentrations of seams exist yet)(their also will not be Ideal "i am the only farmer circumstances"

To summarize: To get a full set of gold jewelry you will need to deconstruct 240+ gold jewelry taking approximately 3.3+ days of gameplay to get or harvest 4000+ nodes taking approximately 10+ days of gameplay

I am not trying to be negative, summerset is in my opinion the best update to eso since launch and i am extremely excited. Im also not saying that jewelry crafting needs to be easy. If ZOS wants to have this crafting skill line be harder than the others and crafted jewelry needs to be a rarer thing that is 100% fine. It does need to be something that people can actually do in a semi reasonable time frame with semi reasonable effort or noone will do it. As it stands now trying to gold out even 1 set of jewelry is going to be extremely difficult.