You could always dock your ship at the fleet & conduct most of your business on the ship, then get off and go to the GTN when you need to. There are a few loading screens involved, but maybe that's a fair trade for a little peace & quiet.

I've gotten ~10 schematics from UT missions (all tier 1 missions) as I've been grinding crafting mats since the weekend, so they are definitely still dropping. Sounds like a run of bad luck.

Have you tried typing the word in another program on your computer where you can replicate the character you want, then copy+pasting it in to the Legacy box? My Legacy uses the character "ë" and this is how I did it - it worked for me in that circumstance.

So, let me see if I understand. The goal here is to make Biochem/Cybertech less desirable (or in some cases, mandatory, depending on the "leetness" of your group leader). In order to do this, the highest level crafted consumables (and/or reusable consumables) have been lowered in effectiveness. However, they are still the highest level crafted consumables available, efficiency nerf or no. And now you also have to have the highest level available in their respective skill trade to use them at all. I fail to see how this makes either skill LESS appealing. If anything, I would expect MORE people would now find it beneficial to have these skills themselves since they cannot buy the items for use if they do not have the corresponding max level crew skill. Maybe I'm missing something

This is one of my main issues currently as well. There's no in-game way that I am aware of to identify a schematic as one that you already know. If you try to open the crew skills window to check, well, that won't work, since the game will only let you have two windows open at a time - and to get to your specific "manufacturing" crew skill detail panel, you first need to have the MAIN crew skill panel open. So, GTN + main crew skill window + specific crew skill window = 3 windows, which is obviously greater than the 2 window limit. I could be missing something, and if so please let me know, but for now the only system I can think of to identify already known schematics while browsing the GTN is to keep a separate, out of game list going of all of my known schematics. Either that or have to close out of the GTN every time I see something I may not know, check my skill panel, reopen the GTN, reapply all my drop downs and filters and search again - which, really, no thanks.