What are you looking to use illustrator for? To my naive eyes patterns on jewelry you've linked to in the past looked like they'd be more easily done algorithmically than by pushing splines around by hand, and there are plenty of fun places to go with that.
I've been a fan of Bathsheba Grossman for quite some time and Autodesk has been really obnoxious about generative design for quite some time. And honestly, I've forgotten more CAD than most people will ever know. Here's the problem: The tools you use greatly influence the art you produce. The fundamentally awful sound of pop music from around 1996 to around 2007 was due in no small part to Pro Tools Mix, which would do just enough stuff almost well enough to make you use it. It became super-easy to make things overproduced - this is why the "wall of sound" in, say, Hysteria-era Def Leppard is pleasing but the "wall of sound" in Come On Over-era Shania Twain is like an acid bath despite Mutt Lange doing both. Hysteria was a big angry tape machine used to its limits. Come On Over is a Pro Tools rig used to its limits. Those limits are technically vaster but aesthetically poorer. Fundamentally, jewelry designed in cad programs looks like shit. I'm not bloody bad at hand sketches when forced to do them. Unfortunately I took a class in Photoshop back when Photoshop was at 2.0 and I can honestly and confidently say that Adobe's control schema has been alien to me for longer than kingmudsy has been alive. Fundamentally, however, the goal is to make "thing that I think is cool" as opposed to "thing my tool makes simple" which means learning new tools. I'm simply and superstitiously afraid of making bad art because I've learned that the stuff that turns my crank is often the stuff that turns other people's stomachs and I am not the slightest bit interested in generating jewelry for people who want the best SolidWorks can do.