I'm going to make one off-beat method that might just work depending on the display mode....
What if you overlay two (or 3) fully developed gears and slowly rotate then away from each other? They would begin to appear solid, and as you spin them "apart", they would appear to be having deeper grooves cut into them. In this method, it is a single mechanism setup for each tooth where the cutter rotates and plunges while the gears follow a custom "indexed" profile.
Again, are you capturing all the teeth being cut, or just a single cut? For the following cuts, you need to modify the "blanking" gear so it doesn't obstruct the previous cut. This reduces the effort from 5000 to 20.