I have been working recently to reach Guru level in Alchemy.  Any other players that have suffered through this process are painfully aware that most of the top end Alchemy recipes require one or more rare components - Oils/Traces/Saps etc and that Oils all require some type of Fruit of X as a component.  Currently in North America, all the fruits are heavily backordered on the marketplace, making gathering and a few quests the only method of aquiring them.  The challenge, as any gatherer knows, is that Wild Herbs are currently the only gathering source and Fruit of Xs drop randomly (any one of the 8 types) and fairly rarely.

My suggestion to improve the current shortfall of these items is two-fold; 1: add them as a drop to fruit trees - this seems to me to be almost a logical no-brainer and it continually amazes me that Fruit Trees are not  a source for Fruit of X.  2: add a vendor/NPC that will exchange different types of Fruit.  I envitably wind up with tons of fruit I'm not currently interested in while attempting to collect enough of a certain type (Sun/Abundance/Nature/etc) - it would be fantastic to be able to trade some of what I don't currently want for some of what I do. One for one, or even two for one.

These two changes probably won't eliminate the current MP bottlenecks, but would certainly add more supply to a gameworld currently in bad need.

Fruit yield got buffed some time ago, it was worse. My guess is that alchemy is heavily bottlenecked and hard to master by design.

Alchemy lvl up 50 times slower and 100 times more expensive than cooking, and it does not give us any tangible benefit.

I have master 9 and I don't see any option to reach a guru lvl.

If that is the case (My guess is that alchemy is heavily bottlenecked and hard to master by design}. I'd like to know why.  There don't appear (at least to me) to be any more 'get rich quick' elements to Alchemy than Cooking, it's nearest lifeskill cousin.  All that aside, the  relatively inavailability of resources makes using the lifeskill impossible, not difficult.  It makes little sense that resources are so scarce as to be almost unobtainable (spending days gathering herbs to obtain 100 of a certain type of fruit falls into this category) and defeats the purpose of having the lifeskill.  I don't think adding one more source that is not a common item (fruit trees aren't everywhere) and a NPC that would allow exchanges of Fruit already in the world will not drastically increase supply, but would help a bit.

You are M27, doing good. I don't know how it is on the NA server but on EU people are doing good too. There are many people at guru level. I'm at G5 and not even tryharding it. I wouldn't say it's impossible, hard for sure. The alchemy rush after lifestones is settling.