One man army... or trade union?

So after hitting 80 I toyed around with what trade skills my shamans should have. My paladin was already a miner/JC and I had found it very profitable and of great benefit with the prismatic gems.

I had a think about it and realized I had two paths to go down:

• Min/Max: I could take all the same tradeskills simple for their added benefits. I think at the moment the best combination would be JC/Blacksmith. This would give you 3x Prismatic Gems as well as 2 additional gem slots for epic gems.
  
• Self-sufficient: Cover all tradeskills to have access to all cooldowns and special items as well as more utility.

While min/maxing would be insanely expensive if skilling up simple using the auction house, I did have access to a miner so if I wanted to farm the materials I could have. I did some calculations and worked out I would need something to the tune of 4000 thorium ore alone which sort of blew my mind.

I decided to leave it for awhile and I did a bit of PvP and Heroics. I leveled Enchanting and Inscription on Slatza - who always seems to get the best of all the drops - I figured if I ever had to just take my tank and one shaman specced Resto with me somewhere it would most likely be Slatza. After doing a whole bunch of old world instances and filling up my bags I realized that giving one of my characters Engineering would give me access to Jeeves - a 1 hour cooldown repair and reagent bot.

On another note - I had started to get into playing the auction house quite heavily, you may notice alot of my other blogs I read are about the wow economy and people blogging about hitting the gold cap. With access to every tradeskill I could easily play many markets at once and buy raw materials to convert cheaply into enchanting materials or resale.

So I worked out who was going to get what tradeskill:

Slatters - JC / Mining
Slatza - Enchanting / Inscription
Slatzb - Engineering / Blacksmith
Slatzc - Leatherworking/ Skinning
Slatzd - Tailor / Alchemy

 So far I have completed JC/Mining/Inscription/Enchanting/Engineering all to 450. My next focus is going to be to finish up Blacksmith and then probably Tailoring and Alchemy. I think I'll leave Skinning to last because its going to be the most time consuming and I have a few days off coming up soon where I can sit and AoE some low level mobs.

I'm curious as to which path other boxers take and why?