This doesn’t help those who smashed every gem other than what their BIS list told them to aim for, but for those that kept other gems around because no system in 20 years has gone without balancing after release in WoW, an FYI:
If you stand on top of the Primordial Jeweller’s Kit in Morqut Village, you get an extra action button that allows you to remove gems from your ring while leaving them intact to reuse later. It seems that very few people know this is possible.
It’s still a god-awful, uninspired system where you will take whichever dps increase sims best for your character at all times, but at the very least you can switch between the options as Blizzard buffs and nerfs them in real-time.