At the moment, 4 nations have national mages that can forge clams. If they were nature-1,water-1, no-one would have national mages that could do it, but if jade amazons (not any old amazon will do) are found, then it can be done on a much lower maintenance bill.
At that point, I'm done with this topic. I fear, because there's been so much disagreement, that there's no hope of getting any fix at all. I was plugging for a smaller fix mostly because I thought it was the only proposal that had any chance of getting past the devs.
I guess we're gonna have to learn to live with clam-hoarders