JC vs Alchemist

I'm planning on playing two teams for Cata - 5 priests and 5 druids. I may try 10 boxing, but that's a different story.

Over the weekend (I resubrscribed out of boredom) I decided I'd to the professions as the following:

Druid 1: herb, mining (this is my tanking toon)
Druid 2-5: alch, engineering

Priest 1-5: JC, engineering

I want the engineering for PvP.

JC is turning out to be brutal to level - more difficult than any other profession I've ever done.

What is going to make me the most money? I know you can't answer in absolutes given the unknown in Cata, but is it better to just have all the toons be alch and have one JC to cut everything I need?

The only 2 reasons why you want multiple jew crafters (imo) is:
a) to max the profession bonus for your class (i.e. jc specific gems)
b) to be able to do more cuts when cata releases than the competition, i.e. you can do dailies with more than 1 toon.

For me that's personally not beneficial enough for the effort it takes.

Thanks for your help. JC is being really tough...

What about the JC daily quests I used to hear about? If it's only for competition and the early phases, i really don't care. I'm more interested in the low upkeep daily gold that I thought transmuting would provide, while JC provides the gems for the transmutes. Am I missing something?

If things go through as they are now, I think they'll both be viable. I'm going to go with transmute spec'd alchemists for my new team. Having the JC's are good but over time I think the xmutes work out to be more, just my two cents though. (turning rares into epic [gems] seems better over the long haul).

Leveling 5x JCs is painful enough that I'm definitely considering dropping it unless someone chimes in and tells me why I should have multiple JCs.... that's a weekend possibly wasted :( I only got 5 to skill level 50, but damn it was painful.

Personally I would do ALCH / ENG on your second team as well. Just dump 1 ALCH for a JC.
I had multiple JC's on 1 team before and realized after dumping $$ to level it that it was a big waste.

Now I sit on 1 JC across all teams just for the cuts. On my home server I think I'm at 15 ALCH and they net me 2 - 4k per day with gems / cuts. Although I have not used them now in a long time.

Zenga pointed out the good pros of multiple JC's. I agree, not beneficial enough.

**EDIT**
I do not know what is in store for JC for CATA release. So you might want to look into that first before making a decision.

This is all good news - thanks to everyone for their help. I am going to enthusiastically drop JC from all my priests and make them all alch/eng.

New plan (for anyone who is bored enough to care)

5 priests alch/engineering
1 druid mining/herb
4 druid alch/engineering

1 pally enchant/JC

I guess the only other concern I have is if I don't ever play my pally. For enchanting that's fine as I can just use him to d/e the greens that don't sell for much. For the JC is the only way to get new cuts by doing the JC daily?

I've played off and on since release, but apparently I'm a huge profession noob. The last time I had a maxed out profession was my single boxing fury warrior with BS/eng... I've ignored them since then and that's probably the reason I don't have any gold :(

I did JCx5 once. ONCE. And I will never ever do it again unless they make the middle shit require less to skill up. I remember at one point paying 500g per skill up, f'ing AH was monopolized. With changes to the way skillups work in Cata, it may be much easier and worth your time. As it stand now I suggest alchemy all the way. Minimum effort, max reward.

The big upside I've had with JC was the daily rewarding a token redeemable for a Dragonwhatever that sold on the ah for a long time for 90g. It's down to about 55g now, some you have to weigh that pure profit versus the profit on the transmute after mat costs. As the gems on my server have whittled down, they margin has been pretty comparable on both, but the costs of leveling JC were insane. I'm still in the process of doing another five (I already have one) in hopes of making some back on cata release and for something to kill time until then. That's just on my server of course, there are probably things I'm not considering as well but I have the cash to burn and not much else to spend it on right now.

Im going alch/eng on my guys that dont have skillz yet. I see nothing at all viable about more then one JC.

Can't wait until I get 20 pyro rockets I took some guy off a flyer with living bombs and 1 pyro rocket yesterday it was a hoot.

I bought tons of titanium ore and prospected them for the titanium powder which I used to buy the epic recipies, I have all I need now. I never did one JC daily. But I spent over 50,000 on ore but got most of it back.

I'v got 160K in the bank and am very comfortable gold wise, see my web site for the trade skills I have. All my gold came from trade skillz; I hardly even loot in DB much anymore, just don't need to. I make 3000gold selling a titanium razorplate chest (and I always have 15-20 high end items for sale), I have to loot thousands of mobs to get that in sellable stuffs (well from the onslaught camp where I am).

I have 2 JC's. The only real advantages are 1) I got the cuts I wanted in half the time and 2) I would have one in each of my 5 man groups in case a pattern drops :/