Actually, I figured out the grind technique by accident. You can pull apart the shards themselves, not just magical items. That means the grind is: get a bunch of materials, combine them into shards (get crafting XP), pull shards apart (get tiny bit of XP), repeat ad nauseum. You never actually make any items. You don't get XP for item production anyway, and including that step in the grind process was a massive PITA anyway. There's a few idiosyncracies to picking which shards to build, and you rarely get back the same amount of materials that you put in, but it's mostly just a question of time and patience. I got Wouldii from ~lvl8 on all 3 types to ~lvl22 on all 3 types in about an hour before running out of lesser essences (you can turn greaters into lessers via a vendor, 5 for 1, but I've avoided doing that so far). Right now, the only economical way to get lesser essences is by tearing things apart, and the higher tier shards (I'm reliably doing tier 3's now out of I think 7 tiers total) take a couple hundred lessers each so that appears to be the limiting factor.
We'll have to see how much steeper the "prices" are to build unbound items. If the requirements get too steep, it might not make sense to have a "designated crafter" in the guild. If it turns out to be reasonable, I should have Wouldii in position to help the guild, particularly our lowbies.