yeah. my guild bank has 6 tabs full of various alchemy mats. whee. (well, whatever the max number of tabs were prior to the guild level additions...). The reason is that for most of wrath I just bought alchemy mats in bulk whenever they were available out of my epic xmtues, because when leveling my initial teams i always had trouble with mats. The stranglekelp/firefin range is probably the worst, although goldthorn is notoriously bad. Honestly, any of them can be incredibly annoying when there are none on the ah. Use auctioneer and make a snatch list of all the mats that you think are remotely rare (I did this for all the mats) and just buy them when you see them relatively economically priced. (I did it with my centralized AH Buyer seller character that mails everything to everyone.) I was in the process of leveling up 30 or so alchemists but about half of them never got past 60 or so cause I got sick of instance-boosting and quit in the middle, but I still have all the mats. I'll get back to that project eventually, but really that or farming is your only option. Farming with a druid might not be so bad actually, given flying in old world...

Ya know, someone should make an addon for bulk mailing things for boxers hehe. Funnel all non-equipment to a specified character, and configurable send 10 X,5y,3z to characters a,b,c,d. I actually hard coded some stuff for epic gems in wrath, but have neither the time nor inclination to take it to the level that a general release would entail. I had a deal going with a friend who was cutting gems where I would COD him gems for slightly under market value. Being the lazy SOB that I am, i automated the 'add gems to mail window and set the cod price' bit. Ultimately expanded that into automating the distribute mats bit...but that code is rather convoluted and hackish...hehe.

I in no way endorse the use of this file, it is basically functional at this point, tho as I said names and things are hardcoded. A lot of leftover stuff from wrath too, for my personal use I sort of hacked in the cata stuff=p. Isn't hard coding fun?
Lua file / Repo

Mostly linking it cause you mentioned buying/selling centrally. Theres also some other misc stuff in there...pretty much "Ishar experiments with lua" file, lol.

Edit: Just wanted to clarify that I'm including the file incase anyone feels handy or inspired to do something similar to what I did. By all means grab the file and hack it to suit your characters =p I provide zero support, though, lol.