We had a pretty big thread about alchemist's powers as NOT as "X per day" or "At will" power, but as ammunition (bombs, potions, charms etc) that could be crafted in advance and stocked up. The advantage of this is that it's very satisfying from a RP point of view and it's a strong differentiation element from other spell-casters.
The problem is that it's *extremely* hard to balance. The thread (which was lost in the database crash) never found a satisfactory solution. Weight/encumbrance? Ok, but what about a bag of holding dis-balancing the class? Cost-based? Sure, but then suddenly the power of a class is related to how much money the party gets? Time to create? Ok, but that makes balancing reliant on the amount of off-time between adventurers. Or an alchemist could "nova" in one fight and then have nothing for the rest of the adventure.
One of the better suggestions I saw was that alchemy required rare resources (as opposed to gold in general), I first came across in an odd book I reviewed (see
https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/16/16808.phtml , the chapter on alchemy, for details). The problem with this of course is that it's still hard for the GM to determine how much of this rare resource should the PC have access to. There is no clear guideline here...
So given all that, I'm quite willing to "forgive" wonky bomb creation rules. It gets *reallllly* complicated otherwise.