I understand that you want to ensure that crafters will be able to keep making these staves, but I have a few suggestions that might work for both sides of this.
As someone else mentioned before me, you could limit the number of retries to 3 per staff. Alternatively, you could make it so that to remove an augment, you'd need items that can be made by the same crafts as was required for making the staff.
These items could be expensive, but not quite as expensive as buying a whole new staff. If you could re-augment the staff at a cost around 25% of a new staff, perhaps you'd end up with 4 times as many people trying to augment theirs, resulting in just as big an income for the crafters.
