Mining is the only profession where getting a moonstone shard is almost actively disappointing due to how it works. It takes up a spot in your very limited cart, which then prevents you from smelting a full bar of other ores. But you don't feel like you can toss it, because it IS valuable. It's just not quite valuable enough to feel good. It also takes way more food and time to collect a single shard than most other professions, since you have to go out, mine, come back, and smelt.
My suggestion is to change it so that these ^ show up at a much lower frequency, and when smelted give you an actual whole complete moonstone. Then change it so that moonstone shards appear randomly as a bonus item when smelting. This should be roughly equivalent to the current frequency that you find the shard ores now, with exact rates tweaked to account for the new possibility of finding a whole moonstone while mining, and the fact that smelting happens in lower numbers than mining does. In other words, this suggestion doesn't want the overall rate of moonstone collection to change. It's just to make seeing that moonstone ore in your cart exciting instead of mildly annoying.
