I have played the adventurer class a lot for a long time, my main adventurer has been around for a few years and has been straight gathering for most of that time. I find that if you start at 0 fatigue 13 hour searches are pretty good at avoiding fatigue. Follow with 7 hours in a tent and your ready to go again. Changing your search type is good depending on what your searching for. If you don't care what you find then go pretty and plenty and you'll find more stuff. If your going for a specific item you need to figure out if its common, pretty and plenty, or rare, so do a rare search. Hell you can even find rare items doing pretty and plenty so its not like it completely destroys your chances, just greatly reduces them
And yes I have a huge list of items on my character even with using a bunch over the years to create and repair magic items.
