Definitely sounds like the player asked you to imbue skills which were in the same skill group.
Group 1: Archery, Peacemaking, Healing, Resist Spells, Ninjitsu, Chivalry
Group 2: Bushido, Veterinary, Anatomy, Eval Int, Necromancy, Stealing
Group 3: Disco, Parry, Stealth, Med, Focus, Animal Lore
Group 4: Provo, Taming, Tactics, Spirit Speak, Wrestling
Group 5: Magery, Musicianship, Swords, Fencing, Macing
If an ABC archer asked you to add Archery (group 1), Resist Spells (group 1), and Chivalry (group 1) to one ring the only thing that would be on that ring when you were done is Chivalry, if it was the last property imbued.
Instead, they need to ask for a ring with Archery (group 1), Bushido (group 2), and Tactics (group 3)
My personal tip for making jewelry is I try to look to add the +skills for things that are either insanely slow to raise, or cannot be attended-macrod. You would not, for example, want to add +26 skill to something like meditation or animal lore because they rise so damn fast. Instead choose something hard which is a pain in the arse to raise! Taming is a great example of something you would likely want to add +skill for because its SO SLOW and SO BORING. Tactics is another... well you can figure the rest.
It's unfortunate that imbuing is SO COMPLICATED, to the point where just to be able to ask an artificer you have to have all the knowledge of an artificer!
And even then, there's no guarantee your artificer will know what they are doing. More than once I've had things I've asked for messed up, and I didn't know enough at the time to know it could have been done differently, and better. So I set about learning and I believe I'm more informed than the average random legendary artificer on my server now... and my little newbie is only 78 skill.
I don't think it's UO trying to "screw the crafters", it probably has more to do with some old code with the way the skills are set up. And yes they could fix it so you could add any combination of skills, but it might require a complete re-tooling of so much code, and so many things that could be affected, so it's just not worth it for them. Imagine how many places skills are referred to in the code. Now imagine them doing it and then you log in one day and every skill is FUBAR. Not fun. It's easier for them to just let the current system ride, rather than risk countless man hours to fix one small annoying thing.
