That's true. I got my Spectacles doing every synth painfully manually with HQ materials, as I didn't come up with this rotation until after my third Artisan Tool. I did have Culinarian fully melded however because I knew I'd get plenty of use out of it. It's definitely the class to do it on. Even on a legacy server the materials for everything else is so much more expensive than Culinarian's Relish.

In the thread I linked there's some lengthy discussion on how the Control requirement in the rotation is much higher than needed for the rotation to actually HQ, so (to the OP) might be worth looking to see just how little you can meld and get away with.