Best things I can say about archaeology:

I can do it while in a raid group, talking on Mumble, waiting a full team.
It takes me to corners of the world I'd not see otherwise.
The rare items are different - entertaining and funny.
The digsite 'survey' mechanic is nicely different - more amusing than mining or herbing.

But it's dang painful overall. Four digsites per continent is way too few; the travel time alone makes for a long, slow grind, especially when most branches don't have anything you want. Tol'vir has the best stuff left for me, but if I want that Crawling Claw, I'll have to solve many dozens of night elf, troll, and fossil artifacts with no hope of anything new. And the cool vanity items take up bag space like crazy.

My suggestions:
- Have three or four digsites PER ZONE, and/or have some way to focus on a particular branch of archaeology.
- Provide some way that we don't have to use bag space for all the vanity items.
- Create some useful, consumable solves. What if you could get Chaos / Crusader / Frozen / Runed orbs as semi-rare solves? Maybe they could even be spread across all branches, so at least you have a vague, distant hope of getting something useful from a branch that's otherwise all solved out. If the older orbs were fairly common, it might also make crafting some of that older gear more feasible. Current orbs could be kept extremely rare.

I love the concept, and it's aligned with their goal for having multiple paths of character advancement. I hope Bliz takes the time to put some polish on it and make it less painful. But I'm afraid that they'll just give up, walk away, and leave it the ugly mess it is right now.

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