#32 - Nov. 15, 2007, 6:21 p.m.
There's a couple factors at work here that I think are leading to your frustration.
First, you're still a relatively low level in comparison to the rest of the playing population. What that means, especially for a profession that makes consumables, is very few people are going to go looking for what you have to make. At lower levels, and especially for players focused on leveling, the gains from buying and using elixirs isn't as obvious to most players as say... buying a ring. To solve this you really need to be up on the average level curve, where everyone else is, to gain the most from your profession.
I don't think the transmutes are a bad idea, but I think you may be placing a lot of importance on getting them done when I would recommend putting more importance on leveling and getting up to the rest of the crowd where they will be interested in your wares.
To answer your concern about transmute cooldowns, they have a cooldown so that the relatively common and cheaper materials aren't easily and abundantly transmuted to the more expensive. It's to keep them rare, more or less, and keep the economy surrounding those materials stable. If you were able to transmute as much as you wanted, or at least a ton of it, gold bars would be worth no more than iron bars.
"Specxmute" means Spec Transmute (for the illiterate ;) and refers to Alchemy specializations at 375. You can specialize at 375 Alchemy, and when transmuting you can "proc" and receive a greater return. Meaning, you have the mats to do one transmute, but may get two of the item once transmuted. It might be what you're looking for, but you need to get to at least level 68 to and have 350 Alchemy.
Lastly, you may not like Alchemy! There's some professions that people identify with, they love, and almost every character they have uses that profession. It goes the other way too, it may just be that you don't like the idea of Alchemy, and if that's the case, no leveling is really going to fix that.
My advice. Get to 70. Once there you can very easily drop Alchemy if you don't like it, and work on another profession by just buying the materials. It's easy enough to get the gold to do it, and it should only take a day or two to get to 325+ if you've saved enough. I've personally dropped professions and had them back up to 360+ within a couple days. It can be expensive, but if you don't want to buy everything being able to farm low level areas with a 70 is fairly easy.