I think if you've already levelled your mining up to a certain level it'll be annoying to start from the beginning with jewelcrafting (you need a lot of copper ore/copper bars), but it's not impossible. You get that nice racial bonus, and people are always looking for jewelcrafters to cut stuff for them if you want to make some money.

(Re: your edits, when you were talking about Priests the other day I was going to ask if you'd seen any of the analysis from beta testers because apparently everything is changing for healing classes. There's still a lot of retuning going on, but it looks like the new default is LOL NO MANA FOR ANYONE.)