Aetherial Reduction: what am I doing wrong?

[Lastelli]

So, considering the changes that will take place in 3.1 and my renewed interest in end game crafting, I started looking at all the mats that I'll need to craft 2* recipes. Specifically, I decided to start tackling the issue of how to obtain my Aethersands. I read Caimie's guide a few weeks ago and I tried to do everything right: run back and forth to engage 2 nodes to respawn the ephemeral node, follow the optimal rotation (starting with Impulsive and deciding whether to use the other skills depending on whether DE procs) and so on.
I only used said rotation when a hidden mat (furymint or clary sage in my case) appeared and used the "cheap" highland oregano to obtained crystals and clusters.
After around 40 minutes of non-stop gathering I ended up with 15 duskborne ae.s. (useless) and 1 (ONE!) NQ leafborne ae.s. So, considering that chest and legs pieces require 3 sands, possibly HQ, I think that I'm doing something wrong. There has to be a quicker way, right?
Another reason why I think I'm doing something really wrong is that aethersands are relatively cheap, at least on my server (around 150k-200k gil for HQ sands, 10k gil for NQ), so combining this with the fact that I only got one NQ (and some other things that are extremely cheap), the opportunity cost to gather for sands is just too high because gathering from unspoiled nodes would be much more profitable: I gather 40k gil worth of mats from every unspoiled node I gather from, in the 40 minutes I wasted looking for ae.s. I could have gathered stuff worth 200k gil or more. So, unless gatherers on Ragnarok are completely irrational, there must be another way.

What are you guys doing to consistently obtain your aethersands? How many do you get in, say, 1 hour?