A few comments, eventually on Legge at the end.

Sugiar Yao's translation reads:
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The saying to be flourish 'Hundred activity beside for fulfill market demand should be usefull for solve the matter, Prophet/ Innovator learn to achieve goal also match to the universal balance law'.
***

There's a lot of food for thought in that translation. Babelfish, one of the web-based translation programmes, offers this more succinct translation:
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Sub-Xia Yue: All the various crafts occupy four by Cheng Qishi; So that gentleman study its road.
***

Though I don't understand it I quite like the Sub-Xia idea, it certainly rolls off the tongue quite nicely. The facility to simply change anything that doesn't make sense to the translation engine into a name is a very cute trick, and could usefully be employed to clear up most of the outstanding problems we have in understanding early Chinese texts, not to mention fixing all those Khitan script difficulties. With Babelfish you end up with a picture of Cheng Qishi driving around southern Henan (sub-Xia), studying his own route on Sinomaps. Very pretty, but which translation is the better?

And so to Legge... a few centuries ago 'mechanic' was a standard term for 'artisan', so no trouble there, though I suspect that it was already a little archaic by the time Legge used it. Legge's translation of the second section, "The superior man learns, in order to reach to the utmost of his principles", seems prima facie to be clear enough. And Thomas glosses Legge's 'superior man' as:

君子, junzi, can be translated as superior man, or gentleman, it refers to an accomplished Confucian scholar.

And that's fine... with the pedantic observation that whenever Confucius is recorded as using the term it cannot refer to a 'Confucian scholar', after all, the 君子 existed before Confucius. But what are the implications for that term here? And why are the 百工 compared to or contrasted with the 君子? The initial discrimination between the two seems to be one of social status, with the lesson of the text being that although these two groups occupy different spheres of the social firmament, they both have their methods of perfecting their craft, the one in his workshop, the other in his study. The implication is resonance, that philosophical speed-bump that prevented the early Chinese thinkers from asking that question that the Greeks never gave up on: "Why doesn't the Earth fall"?

Thomas' explication of the Buddhist underpinnings of Zhu Xi's interpretation is neat, and Cui Bao's 古今註 makes it clear that even in the 周禮, the character 肆 in such a situation only meant to display wares for sale. Zhu Xi's imposition of the word 'government' tells us more about him than about the early text.

Thanks to Thomas for his writings over the years, always thoughtful.

best,
Jamie