Okay, so, here's my thoughts, for what it's worth...
I chose Alchemist, paid for the class profession, and leveled it, based on the fact that it allows me to produce chain mail. That ability has now been taken away and that makes me a saaaad panda, and kinda upsets me that I wasted the coin and money.
However, I honestly do understand why only smiths would be given the ability to make it, because the only reason Alchies were the ones to make it previously is that previously the plugin only allowed for chainmail to be made via cauldron mode. Now that the plugins support Smiths making it, it makes more sense for Smiths to make Chainmail instead of Alchemists.
THAT SAID... All of us who chose Alchemist so we could make chainmail have effectively been screwed out of our coin and our levels unless we want to keep using a now mostly-useless profession. I really only see two "fair" ways of remedying the situation:
1. Allow Alchemists to ALSO make chain mail so that we can continue using the ability to make chainmail. Maybe even raise the cost to make chainmail, but don't make it overly prohibitive... chainmail is only marginally better than nothing, gets eaten up very quickly, and those wearing it are squishy enough to lose it often. Worst case scenario, maybe just double the current recipe requirement. (so, example, two feathers instead of one, six iron fences instead of three, etc). I'd rather not see diamonds or lava buckets required to make subpar armor.
-or-
2. Let Alchemists who want to change their class put in a PE to be reimbursed the coin to change classes (what is is, 150c? 250c?) And we'll just assume the levels lost are the price of having had the ability for a short while. I'd honestly be okay with this if I knew I was going to get my coin back. Since I mostly just build things, I don't make much coin, and 150c to me is a helluva lot of coin (roughly 2+ weeks of voting coins, because a few days worth go to town tax).
-or- (insert controversy here)
Lastly... and I really hate to throw another gallon of gas on the fire, but if you want to be accurate to the RPG element, it should be Engineers, not Smiths, who get to make Chainmail. Smiths didn't typically make the high-detail item like chainmail, it was left to more specialist artisans. It's one thing to bang out a piece (or pieces) of metal into armor plates. It's another thing entirely to tackle the math involved to get the right measurements out of hundreds or thousands of little circles, and it was beyond the abilities of most smiths. Anyone who used too much or too little material to make chainmail quickly found themselves out of business because it's such a labor-intensive armor type. You really needed to have exactly the right amount, or you risked wasting dozens or hundreds of hours on something that didn't fit right. And that took engineering math at the time.
(/controversy)
Alchemists, on the other hand, would require some sort of reagent to do it, which could be good for some people, and bad for others. Say you're a caster, and you go mining to level your crafter spec or to get redstone or whatever. You come back with a bunch of diamonds. As a caster, you can only really use those for a diamond hoe, which has no advantage over other hoes except that it does a little more melee damage. I'm not a caster, but I'm pretty sure casters rely much more on skills than on the damage of their hoes. Anyway, a caster could take those diamonds they don't need and mix them with other stuff to make leather, which they can use. A farmer could make leather for free, though if there were not many cows, they might not do it very efficiently. An alchemist could make it for a cost, but they could do it as long as they had the easier-to-obtain reagents.
