Lets face it, lore sucks.
I've tried using it with various races, and bards and gnomes, and even at 100% with a high int/wis it's not really reliable. You have to use it multiple times to even get a decent idea of the stats on a given item, and at low percentages the IDs jump all over the place making it pretty much useless.

at 75% with a normal int/wis warrior I've lored 20 times and gotten a different result every single time.

How about giving em a small boost in success % and giving a message instead when it fails?
Along the lines of 'You can't recall the properties of this particular xxx'

And increasing mana costs to make up for it? Maybe up to like 100 or so that you can't spam it too much but it would still be marginally useful even unperfected?