I personally think they should just increase the yield that you get from nodes. I mine up all the stuff I use on my GSM and when I make a batch of HQ rings to sell I use quite a bit of shards. It's like 5 for the ingot, 5 for the gem and 6 for the ring and when I'm making 20 rings or so that adds up pretty fast. The JAs that miner/botanist have are nice but GP generates ridiculously slow and potions that give GP have a stupidly long cool down.