Questions about seemingly useless gathering skills.

[Avalios]

Luck of the Mountaineer has a niche use in forcing treasure maps to pop. If you find one of those nodes that gives you a native +30% HQ chance and pop the +30% HQ skill on top of that, there's a pretty good chance that your first three swings will enable it. (Note that level 60 nodes seem to only have one type of map or the other even if you use this.)

Have you tried this personally with maps? I have been told it does not work on them.

[PirateCat]

Did it once on the aforementioned +30% HQ node in Churning Mists. The node spawned a wyvernskin map. I didn't grab it since I was looking for a dragonskin and then I found one the normal way before I saw the +30% bonus again, but it does work in general.

I suppose it's theoretically possible that some nodes might have no hidden map at all even with the timer allowing it, but I don't have a lot of data points to work with.