Playing 1.8.9-1.5.2, I'm not seeing the recipes (in JIT) for diamond dust and recolored diamonds, and indeed I can't craft diamonds into dust.

I can understand why you might not want to have 16 colored diamonds (and blocks thereof), but perhaps instead the gem cutter could work on other minerals? Emeralds and Lapis are obvious, redstone a maybe, metals and even mod gems/metals could be a possibility. (From what I've seen, you'd need to reorganize the ring code so that "gemstone rings" are variations of a single item, instead of testing for all variations.)

They are removed from that version - I'm not willing to create 100+ different JSON files for each variant. I will look into expanding the gem cutter though.

We've decided not to go through with this.