I just made 250k from forging for about 2 weeks, not including whatever sold in the shop. You could probably make more money doing other stuff, but I don't think that's too bad. Though that's also probably the best I've ever made in a short time.
Forging is good if.. if you are a very casual lusternia player but somehow have enough credits to trans it and buy a mallet. I got lucky by winning 400 credits in a beta server hamsterhunt. People hate having to waste a bunch of time forging when they could be doing more profitable stuff like bashing, or doing something more fun in lusternia like anything other than forging. I don't mind because I just pop in every now and then, and during forging I can play other video games, do homework, etc.

If you want to get transcendent skills with minimal actual labour, become an Alchemist. An investment of 35 lessons (Capable Alchemy lets you make health potions) yielded me 3-4 transcendent skills (in addition to Alchemy itself). If you are known as a reliable alchemist, you will regularly make 50-100k gold in 5-15 minutes of work.

Assuming you're able to find the herbs you need. The only real downside to the trade is that you have to reinvest most of your income into purchasing supplies, as it is with most trades.

If you do price gouging.

Come on, 50k in fifteen minutes? What the heck are you charging for kegs?

I make a good living as a cook, but I also own two private cartels and sell pretty much only my own recipes. And I do it with a reasonable markup on my goods.

I mean... I charge 2k for kegs. If he's doing like 1 keg in half a minute, that's 30 kegs in fifteen...

Oh! I see what he means now. That's 60k. What do you know, Alchemy IS a good trade skill...

I never said it was a -bad- one, I just wasn't convinced you could do that much in fifteen minutes. So I stand corrected (please note, this means I'm admitting that my skepticism was misplaced, ie, I was wrong, it's a rare thing on these boards I want full credit for it).

Are there actually a lot of orders for 30 kegs that come in?

I am both an enchanter and a dreamweaver, so I can help you out with your decision.

Enchanting has netted me a very large amount of profit, though it has been a long term investment. There is always a need for enchantments in every organization, and so long as you have the market channel open you have a decent chance of finding work. Even better, if you can find an aethershop owner to sponsor you, you will have a constant stream of requests.

As for dreamweaving, I chose it solely for the coolness factor. After all, what's better than infiltrating the dreams of your enemies and giving them nightmares that literally scare them to death? Its combat application is somewhat difficult, yet can be useful for prolonged group fights. Personally, I just enjoy spying on other nexii whilst in my all but impercievable dreamform.

Actually, yeah..I had an alt who was an enchanter for a bit, and one who was a jeweler.
Of the two, I thought that enchantment was far more lucrative, though my alt could have just been a bad jeweler .
I had a friend who was a tailor, though, and he seemed to make good money off of that. I mean, if you think about what people will -always- want, that might help? That and I guess the price of the items you are making? Not sure though, still a bit of a newbie, so...good luck though!

Enchanters need jewelers to survive once they can do cubes. Cubes are consumed very quickly and without gloves, require 10 powerstones to recharge to full. While a number of people will provide their own powerstones to bring the price down to just your working time, there are those who don't and if you have a shop of your own, or a guild shop which requires constant stocking, you'll find that you should've just taken jewelry or some other self-supplying business. In addition to this, you need to invest another set of lessons in HighMagic to be able to enchant Mercy, Perfection, Kingdom, and Beauty. The nifty trans skill, which is the Magi Crown, can be runed into permanence so that you can actually change trade skills afterwards. Tailoring would then be a good option to get splendour robes.

On the other hand, the only real source of income for jewelers are the powerstones. Enchanters and Alchemists both require powerstones unless they're willing to use their reserves (more often than not, this is a big no-no). The only problem with powerstones is that they come only every so often and it's luck based. I'm pretty sure someone on the forum has the statistics of the powerstone to gems ratio, but definitely a Hammer artifact would come in handy. You could also borrow these from some people if you know them.

At the end of the day, all trade skills are quite lucrative if you know where to look and how to get consistent customers. Even poisons can be a source of income if Alger was your client, but of course, the other consideration would be the skills you gain along the way and at Transcendence and whether or not you think it'll be useful for you.