Ok, so yesterday I got my smithing up to 239 and I've had tailoring at 288 for ... well ever it seems. What I've noticed is that the success rate with max mastery AA's seems the same once you get to about 220-230 on all recipes up to 300. In other words I have approximately the same amount of fails and successes at 239 skill as I do at 288 skill and that is huge because the grind to get the last 75 points in tradeskills is murder literally - at 288 I've had stretches of no skill ups for 79 combines before.
So, lets brainstorm about what we could do to make it worthwhile for people to do the 220+ tradeskill because at this point I'm going to tell people not to do it for the same reason I'm not going to - no practical reason.