Okay, let's look at it another way. Here are a bunch of different factors that go into a smith making his/her first silver-gilded steel weapon:
availability of iron ore
availability of silver ore
stats
gilding roll
time and opportunity cost
That's quite a lot right there that has to work in balance. Two months ago the way things worked was such that a new gilder stood a decent chance of doing well in the craft if he or she had already put in the time to become a smith. It still wasn't attractive enough that everyone and his brother became a gilder, though. The problem is, the rapid changes that have been made in the past two months have each had a negative impact on gilding. The change in encumbrance (even the revised version) has effectively reduced the amount of iron and silver ore available, since it has reduced the amount that a smith can haul back to the nearest forge. Removing the effect from stat buffs effectively drops every prospective gilder's abilities by two points or so. The addition of the -5 penalty effectively raises the DC of the gilding roll out of the "I can just get lucky" range. Each of these things is a great idea (or not, depending on who you ask) on its own, but they have a cumulative effect. Especially on an apex craft like gilding, which requires two additional crafting skills plus an agonizingly slow resource haul even to attempt -- in that case it's more like multiplicative. (The three other factors I could think of, availability of coal, cost of weapon pattern, and cost of mercury haven't changed that I'm aware of.)
And ultimately it comes down to time. Each of these changes has made smelting take longer to master. When smelting takes longer to master, smithing takes longer still. When smithing takes longer, then so does gilding. The gold cost isn't (in my mind) the main complaint. It's just the odometer that tells you how much time you're spending. It also sends up a flare about the opportunity cost, since each coin you flush down the gilding basin is 1) one that you could've spent elsewhere, 2) one that you could be out re-earning through a dungeon run or three, and 3) a reminder that while you're working on the craft you probably aren't getting much RP in. Mastering a craft is a major sacrifice of scarce free time.
Frankly, I don't think silver gilding should be cheaper or easier than it was. It would be silly if it were possible to flood the market with enough silver-gilded daggers new characters could consistently buy one along with their worn winter cloak from Petre. But it's also silly to act as if these changes had no major negative effects. What had been a craft that was very challenging to become good at has now become a craft that is absurdly uneconomical and impractical to get into at all. A functional PC-driven economy requires competition, not virtual market protection for the few who've already mastered the craft.
That's why upthread I suggested having some gilding variations. My favorite example is copper onto iron, to create a light-weight version of the standard copper weapon. Not something game-changing by any stretch, but an interesting practice item. Right now gilding is (almost*) the only craft that doesn't require you to grind through RL days of making useless items before you even stand a chance of making the good stuff. Irritating as that process is, it's the model the other crafts are built on to make you earn your crafting levels. Gilding doesn't give that opportunity at all, and it suffers for it.
* Herbalism on the other hand gives you useful stuff right away, and is overall almost too easy. I still maintain that the DCs of all the recipes except the cure n wounds potions should be 5 higher, considering how powerful they are. But that's a topic for another thread.
Edited: Me fail English? That's unpossible.