tl;dr: Let your 100% rescue gilds be the first step.
6% success - 50% rescue failure (to my understanding) means you have 6% chance to add gilding without consuming a slot, 50% chance to gild while taking a slot, and then failure on both means you lose the gild and permanently close a slot.
On multi slot equipment, the rescue chance goes down depending on how many gildings + open slots you have.
Getting a lucky 6% success on a 2 slot gilded item sounds nice until you try to add more gildings and find that you're penalized based on 1 gilding + 2 open sockets and fail both subsequent tries leaving you with an item that ends up the same as a failed attempt.
I think it's obvious that at a certain level of production you just shit out 50 pairs of leather boots and it's trivial but early on it's unrewarding.