One of the things I like so much about Pearl is how her social standing in HW reflects our views in RL. Like, pearls ARE used for decoration, something pretty and expensive only wealthy people can afford. That's how it works in the human world, and the fact that homeworld is the same in that sense gives us a sense of familiarity in what's overall a pretty alien (heh) world. And I really appreciate that. I wonder how Pearl feels about non-sentient pearls and their function in universe...
On the first part of your point, while I get the core of what you’re saying, it’s just, most gemstones are used as status symbols and displays of wealth. You have a few, like Diamonds, that have functional uses such as fine blades. But for the majority of people, gems are seen as pretty and expensive trinkets.
The idea that there may be a similarity between the two is perhaps the idea that some gems like Pearls and Rubies can be farmed or grown in the laboratory, respectively. That cheapens their value a little bit.
And then again, you could even talk about the artificial demand created for Diamonds and realise that they aren’t actually as valuable as the company who holds a monopoly on them makes them seem. In that regard, the deconstruction of Yellow Diamond as perfect and infallible seems to take its context from our world.
In the SU world, I don’t know how much of our social constructions of gems crosses over, but if they did, it wouldn’t be very surprising. As much as our writers are creating something new, they’re still part of our world, prone to its subconscious notions of what objects are and the meanings they hold.
I find that the last point is an interesting question. What do gems think of the gems we have here? I do think, contrary to the belief that they immediately plan to liberate these gems, that they’d be rather intrigued, because they can’t for the life of them fathom why we’d choose to wear gem corpses on our ears, around our necks, in our noses and bellybuttons.
Because there’s a fundamental difference between them and our gemstones. They’re alive. They are more than the outer stone that we see. What matters in the stone is the data. The data dictates their basic forms, their abilities. They don’t see a Diamond and salute to her because hers is a rare precious stone (which is not true because of the monopoly and artificial demand explained above). They see the being who established their civilisation as they know it, the years of experience and wisdom, the abilities (gem or not) that allowed her to do that. In fact, it’s even more distancing that we don’t get our semi-precious and precious stones from gems. To them, we just have inferior copies and hollow shells of what a gem should be.
As a crude analogy, it would be as if another species were wear synthetic human skins (think Leatherface but fake) or dangle fake limbs at the ears or even just make use of bags of meat. It wouldn’t make sense to us. It would be a little disturbing, but knowing that they’re fake doesn’t really give us any impetus to stop them.
We sort of just think it odd that they’d want to hang out with the dead versions of us rather than real human beings. And I think that’s what the gems feel about it as well. Because without the life inside, these things are virtually worthless.