Note that my answers reflect the unmodded game, & therefore might not pertain to Masterwork.
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I don't bother with pottery and clay goods, am i missing out on something?
It is so easy to generate wealth in this game that many industries are almost never used. Pottery, glass, wax, dyed cloth, milling, pressing, leatherworking, and even metalcrafting seem to be almost completely ignored in quite a lot of forts. Go ahead & build at least 1 of every type of workshop, sure, but that's really only to be ready in case of a Strange Mood. As far as actually developing an industry, however, only do it if you want to--it's quite easy to run a highly successful & profitable fort with just Planting, Brewing & Cooking.
Just wanted to add that at least according to the wiki, potter isn't a moodable skill, so you don't need kilns for moods. Kilns are only necessary for manufacturing gypsum powder for your healthcare system and for pearlash, if you ever want to use clear or crystal glass. Ceramics are decently valuable: earthenware has a value multiplier of 3, stoneware is 4, and porcelain is 10 (but unlike earthenware/stoneware/sand, infinite* production is not possible). However, not being able to mood potter for quicker high-value goods is a major downside.
In addition, anything that you can actually out of clay you can make out of infinite* glass or plentiful rock/wood, and glass has decent value too (green is x2, wood-limited clear glass is x5, and rare crystal glass is x10). Therefore, potter gets my vote for most useless crafting skill. I only use it for stoneware pots/jugs if I have fire clay, or for unlimited bricks/crafts if I don't have sand and want/need a lot of those.
*assuming you have the clay/fire clay/sand, of course.Wax crafts are meh too (and also not moodable), and the entire beekeeping industry needs work (
why is mead only value 1...) but at least the beekeeping industry's jobs i.e. pressing honeycombs, making wax crafts, and making mead can be set to [AUTOMATIC] reactions in reaction_other.txt, like tanning or rendering fat are by default. The potter reactions are there too, but you probably wouldn't want endless clay or ceramic goods, so setting them to be automated probably wouldn't be all that useful.
P.S. If you want to imitate the aforementioned automations, I also recommend [AUTOMATIC]ing [REACTION:PRESS OIL] at least still in this version, since you probably don't want to cook rock nut paste, preferring to cook press cakes and cook/make soap out oil. The next version will have all sorts of things you can press vegetable oils from like hemp and other seeds, nuts, and olives, so this may not be as universally true then, but it's probable that pastes will remain less useful than press cakes + oil then as well. Your mileage may vary with automatic make soap from oil or make pearlash; you may end up with massive stockpiles, and you won't be able to use oil for cooking / potash for fertilizing. If you only give press rock nut/make potash orders in set amounts (manager or just single, non-repeating orders at the workshops) and only want to use them for soap/pearlash, you should be fine with setting those to automatic too, but I've mostly used the workflow plugin for those.
P.P.S. Also, all of my above comments are on vanilla DF too, although I presume that at least the non-moodability of potter is sufficiently hard-coded that that's carried over to masterwork. Except that I seem to recall Meph has fiddled with at least some professions, so it's possible that what's hard-coded as "potter" is actually used for something else in masterwork.