Some of us just have no idea what we're doing when we first start out as well. It's hard to plan around things you don't know, and the info about EQ tradeskills is a bit all over the place. So much old/outdated/conflicting information that at some point (coming into it blind) you have to just say fuck it and start somewhere. There are so many things I would have done differently in hindsight.
I made a huge noob mistake by starting out all of my TS on my main, who isn't a gnome. I left Tinkering to last, expecting to do it as the
only TS on my alt, only to realize how screwed I am because I have no way to efficiently request all of the pre-req sub-combines from my main who's at almost 350 in everything else. Now I'm left (fully due to my poor pre-planning) either raising the TS on my Gnome as well, or saying screw it. I'm leaning towards the second. lol.
I also missed a few books, and only wound up finding them after farming/crafting a bunch of items that would have been auto granted to me.
Another major noob mistake I made was not realizing that you don't need 100% of all recipes to hit 350 - For my first TS, I wasted a ton of time farming mats for some of the harder recipes high up in the list, only to hit 350 while still having much easier to farm recipes left over that I could have taken advantage of.
In all though, I'm not sure how anyone would do any of this without your lua or MQ in general. If you hadn't started way back, keeping all of your TS up to date, I feel like you'd have to have some kind of illness to even bother starting from scratch at this point.
So thanks, @jb321 . Now to just cure your documentation phobia and I think the world will be a better place