Bigsamps wrote:The gouge is close to the center of the lense and it's about 1/8" long and maybe 1/16" wide.
I don't have any experience of this kind of thing with any lens, let alone a lens for a big Fuji, but conventional wisdom (I mean, once you've got past the conventional hysteria) says that if (as here) a gouge is on the front and is wide enough to have its inner surfaces painted black, paint them black and you won't notice any effect. Googling for "lens chip paint black" or similar might bring first-hand accounts.