I don’t think I quite agree with this, for the following reason: Say you have a 1GA item, so 6+6 rolls. You get a near minimum roll right out the gate for each stat, between 2-4 total rolls. Should I be satisfied with the terrible rolls or just fault myself if I can’t even get one of those stats to roll in the upper range (or come up again at all in some cases) with my remaining 8-10 rolls?
I think that would be a fairly harsh assessment of the player’s behavior, and it only gets worse as you get 2GA and 3GA items. If it took me as few as 2 rolls to get the “right stats” on the item but they rolled minimally, when I have another 14 rolls to go, it’s just greed on the part of the player to hope for something better than a minimum roll on their item which might have 2 or 3 perfect base stats? That leads to a system where you not only “get what you get and you don’t throw a fit”, but it gets more punishing the better the base item you get happens to be with respect to GA rolls.
Having said that, while I would personally see Tempering either go away or have it changed so that scrolls are harder to come by but could be used without a cap, another idea might be that one could consume 2 rolls to re-roll the same stat instead of a new one, randomly chosen. Others have also proposed the idea of letting one keep the current stat a la enchanting. 