Sad Indeed...

 Mini explanation of why Maker skill helps

With the Maker skill, you can synth your items with Luk and Int jewels (only stuff for your job, not common items). If I remember correctly, with the final version of the skill you can use up to 3, but only one of each kind in each piece of gear. The best Luk/Int you can have on the jewel is 3. Aka, free stats that consume no slots and cannot fail. You can also use stims and jewels together to get a perfect statted item with bonus stats on it (realistically), because most armors and stuff are pretty easy to make.

The reason this can't really help a lukless is because you can only use the Maker skill to make items level 50+, so even with the Zhelm and HT pendant, they cannot equip level 50+ mage gear to use the Maker skill on without "wasting int" to do so. Though, even if they did, they wouldn't get as much out of it. Luk would be useless to them, so they'd only get half the total AP off the gear that the Luk mage would get (Luk and Int vs Int alone).

So, for a mage who already has pretty high Luk, it's no real loss to equip the 163 staves, is what I think Kabanaw is getting at. You won't be stronger than a Lukless, but you do get a much cheaper alternative (which looks quite stunning when equipped, at that) that takes full advantage of the stats you already have.

Personally I'll probably take the 163 staff route myself. I can live with doing lower damage than a rich Lukless person; I'd be in that position all along anyways. That, and getting both staves for my elements for the price of one 130 wand (or less) combined would be nice.

That's exactly what I was saying. And actually, you could get up to +5 with a high grade jewel, but those are rare. And if a lukless mage was to use the lvl 70 wand, which has about 93 less MA than the lvl 163 one, the dmg from a luk mage would actually come very close.