Has anyone figured out how to do this yet? I suspect that I can set display only attributes not to display with some coding but this is no solution for someone who is already using the display (read) only setting for attributes.
I haven't seen the issue with jewelry. But if that is the case, it may be easier to add this:

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=83814

It's only one file. On that one file, you can remove the below code and the attributes will not display on the products page. We've tested it out and the attributes do get included on the feed. Just don't show on the page.

Code:
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
  <tr valign="top">
    <td width="50%"><?php echo $left_col; ?></td>
    <td width="50%"><?php echo $right_col; ?></td>
  </tr>
</table>
Our first goal was to get the attributes listed in columns. But since we didn't have "variations", we didn't need the attributes to show on the page. So I removed the tables and it works fine.