I was wondering what other people thought of the process of leveling and using shamanic infusion?

I personally feel pretty uninspired by this skill but I can't really put my finger on what would make it more fun. Or maybe I'm just using it all wrong. I started out really liking the skill: give my armor some cool minor buff using easily obtainable mats, level up my skill - fantastic. And then I hit level 4 and stopped leveling up every time I used an infusion recipe.

Obviously, it makes sense that leveling up would slow down a bit and require more practice. My problem is that practicing shamanic infusion just isn't exciting to me. Working on trade skills that have tangible results is fun - there are lots of workorders to fill for carpentry, toolcrafting etc, there is NPC demand, and if worst comes to worst I can always just vendor my practice items. Leveling up less tangible skills like augmentation and transmutation is also ok - I get something as reward for my practice, so even if it's just a currently fairly worthless bead, I can still save it up for future use if I want. With shamanic infusion, I get to infuse an item and then get rid of it. That just feels non-rewarding. I don't even like infusing the gear I'm currently wearing since I discover new infusions more quickly than I replace gear, and then there's no way to remove the old infusion from my gear if I like a new infusion recipe better for it.

I finally settled for infusing white items since that turns them green and allows me to practice my augmentation on them. That is actually fairly fun, but I'd say it improves the fun of augmentation more than the fun of shamanic infusion since shamanic infusion is still stuck at "spam skill and discard result."

I got shamanic infusion when my combat skills were in their 40s, so I think I'm replacing my gear less often a lower level player would do. So, maybe infusion would actually work out fine if someone first got it around level 15 or so, used it for their fairly frequently replaced gear, and maybe through multiple combat skill switches?

So, how does everyone else like this skill? Is the problem just me?