I agree that people undervalue things now. Auspex Gages are the best BP piece (magical and physical) for players without Nares Cuffs. I have personally seen two players without Nares Cuffs and with 99 SMN win lots on Foreboding Abj: Hands now, and neither of them has purchased Hexed Gages (or likely had them made, considering I buy almost all of the Ethereal Squama).

I kind of disagree that SE thought abjurations would be so uncommon when they made the systems, primarily because they really aren't very uncommon drops from CoP Voidwatch (probably ~10% chance of getting an abjuration). There are something like five per monster, so it'd be a 2% drop rate on the one you actually want (the HQ of). Now you're nearly at body-level odds. Your superficial odds of getting "something" are actually quite good, though.

I think there's a similar issue with Legion. The drop rate of abjurations is, I'm led to believe, actually pretty good off Tier 2 monsters. Even better, you can control who gets what. The obvious problem is that no one does Legion because it requires 18 or 36 people (36 being dramatically better than 18) and many LSs run with something closer to 10 these days.

The problem was designing a crafting system that essentially relies on people paying a reasonable price for/uncursing NQs or people paying an exorbitant price for HQs. They aren't willing to do either. I sold two NQ Hexed pieces since I made that post a week ago (1890k total), and it has cost me 100k and 5 slots to keep the AH stocked. I dumped my Doublet -1 and Gages -1 for 60mil total, which leaves me with 40mil loss. I then made 8 more Hexed Gages NQs and broke/lost one squama to get to 104 (another ~10mil loss). So now I'm level 104 and 50mil in the hole. The sad part is that I've been lucky with Tier 0s (2HQs/90 synths).

I don't think I can sell Hexed Nails -1 at cost, let alone for profit, so I might just end up pausing Alchemy here.