Ascended crafting - marks vs from scratch?

Hey all!

So recently i've taken up a task of ascended crafting. It's been long overdue and i need a better armor set. I crafted my first ascended piece (gloves) a few days ago, and i did it from the recipe. Light armor. I craft my daily cooldowns of everything so i have it in case i need it.

But since i do fractals every day, still T1 but whatever, i know there's a way to get ascended gear by crafting grandmaster's marks. Now what little i've seen, it's more or less the same except you don't need vision crystals, it seems like it uses less leather, but uses steel (tailor) that the "from scratch" recipe doesn't use.

Now, what's better to craft? 3-4 marks required for gear or the gear from scratch? Since it's light armor, it doesn't use steel at all, but uses a fair bit of leather and leather is expensive (for some reason, like reall, wtf?), but the grandmaster mark uses steel and i can farm iron and platinum for the ingredients easily and for free instead of buying leather from TP. I'll still have to buy silk and leather from TP but it may be cheaper? I don't know...

Marks also have more gated materials, so by the time i craft them all and save up enough fractal relics, i might get enough gold to buy the rest of the required materials from TP + farming...

Please advise, i don't know what to do... I'm not super rich, i'll probably go bankrupt doing either, then i'll have to farm gold to continue only to go bankrupt on the next piece and so on until it's finished, so i'd like a less painful route if possible.