I feel your pain, anastobe. I couldn't play regularly back when I needed to learn to smelt Dark Iron, so getting a BRD group was very rare, and they would generally fall apart long before getting to the dude that taught it...one of the 7 dwarfs, as some call them.
After months of trying and failing, I finally get to the 7 dwarf room and some bozo starts their script before I can talk to the right guy. I should have wrote down his name so I could stay mad forever. Lol.
Anyway, by the time I could smelt it and make stuff in Dark Iron, I already had better stuff to make in Thorium.
And then Outland came along and put an end to everything.
In hindsight though, BRD is still a fun place to go, even if just to complete the Onyxia chain.