Inscription sucks! The end.
Just kidding. (or am I?)
So I've done lots of tradeskills. My guildmaster asked me what's wrong when I hadn't switched tradeskills in over a whole month on any of my characters. Honestly what happened is for my main character, I took up jewelcrafting and enchanting. It's glorious. I don't think I'll ever change them.
However, my rogue is a different story. He was an engineer and miner. Now, mining is ok. It does what it does. You don't have to play the auction house, it's a time to money tradeskill. You go gather, you gain wealth, good deal. Feeds into my JC and enchanting like woah. Engineering on the other hand, well it's engineering. No money really but it's got some fun quirky utilities.
However, there's one tradeskill I hadn't tried. inscription! It's been a matter of debate around a lot of forums. People going 'it sucks! its useless!' and people saying 'its the best tradeskill ever, you're just doing it wrong!' So I decided to ignore all these people and try it for myself. What really hooked me was visiting the inscription shop in Dalaran. They have books! TONS of books. They have a spiral library above them full of books. being the lore junkie I am, it sounded really cool to be part of this organization involved in knowledge. Also, I could do fun stuff like make glyphs for my guildmates, roll the dice on Darkmoon cards, maybe make some books to try to sell, etc.
Well first of all, it is the easiest to level tradeskill _evar_. It takes less time than a gathering tradeskill, however it's cheap to just grind up (Thanks Jessica!). One evening and about 1000 gold I had 430 inscription. Of course as anyone who has done inscription knows, you're going to be missing a lot of glyph recipes at that point, but honestly, meh on glyphs.
They're a case of 'why make hundreds of gold a day when you can make tens of gold a day!!!' Yes, you can make money selling glyphs. You need addons to manage your auctions or you'll go crazy, and you have to move a lot, but honestly lots of professions have better income than that. ahem JC and enchanting. Also, meh on making glyphs for guildmates. Somehow they'd rather just pay the 1g50s off the AH then stand around waiting for me to port to Dalaran and make it for them, and honestly, I'd rather them too. meh on glyphs, meh. Plus, as I said before, even after leveling its a big time investment getting glyphs that sell. You either need to buy a bunch of books or keep doing the research patterns each day.
As for the cards, well most of the time, you're losing money. Once in a while you get a good one, but they take forever to sell, especially now since the decks are falling behind. People who are looking for that best gear are often getting their trinkets from ToC raids now instead.
One other thing about inscription is that like enchanting, it has its own built in gathering skill. Well, not quite, because you need another gathering skill to feed that skill. Enchanting takes materials that are drops from killing stuff. So it's more like JC's prospecting. You can make a little money doing this. Herbs are cheap now, really cheap. These materials sell kind of slow, but you can make 10s of gold a day!
Basically, I feel like inscription is jewelcrafting JR. It's a decent skill for new 80's, if you don't have a lot of resources, like if it's your first level 80 character. You can get it leveled up pretty fast, and the material investment to produce things is not large. For anyone who has some wealth built up though, there's much better, more exciting, better money making, tradeskills.
Honestly I'm missing my engineering doodads. Rocket boots and Dalaran auction house ftw ; ;