Personally, I've always kind of thought that it should only be Legendary dwarfs that produce artifacts/have artifact moods. Under the current system, it's a little disruptive to have a novice dwart cheesesmith suddenly up and produce a ruby-studded platinum anvil, by accident, before your first year is out. It's instant-seige-time, over something nearly useless, when you have little to no capacity to defend yourself, or take advantage of it.
It really makes the game feel more like you're ruling over a bunch of idiot-savants than dwarfs.
As far as being able to build everything in two years, yes that's a pretty big problem. I'm planning to mod in a series of steps which will allow a player to repeatedly reforge atleast the components for weapons and armour, to gradually build up their value and strength, over time. This would be something apart from the quality system, and is meant to reduce the "industrial revolution factory" feel of having a core of highly skilled smiths continually churning out steel masterpieces. Under this system, you'd need years of work, planning, resource-gathering, and infrastructure build-up, to even attempt to produce the very best quality items in the game.
This could then be applied to everything from alchohol (attempting triple-distilled, finest brandy spirits, themselves distilled from a blend of several different beers, meads, or wines, mixed with rare spices, and then aged in a series of fire-scorched barrels of different woods)
and cheesemaking (adding additional, rare molds to younger cheeses which have been diced and then fortified with dried fruits, nuts, and herbs then waxing and aging the mixture in honey);
to gemcutting (using a series of wheels, files, and loose abrasives to cut gems into finer and finer cuts, processing and then using harder abrasives as you find them, until you're actually using real gems to cut other gems) ;
and bowmaking (making the best composite bows out of maybe a dozen different components, including several different types of wood that've each been dried or steamed or marinated, or all three, to different degrees, as well as special glues, bones, tendons, what have you, and then weaving the bowstring out of everything from catgut to hemp to silk, and soaking it in Armok-knows-what.).