I'll say this about crafting. Three games I've seen that do crafting exceedingly well, are Aurora, Shores of Hazeron, and... I forget the name of the other one, because it was an extremely small-scale game with pay-to-play dynamics and I couldn't get a foothold, and it shut down several years ago.
What all of these do, is let you take individual parts - in Hazeron a weapon component and a power generator - and mix them in different amounts to achieve different results. In Hazeron, you can have half of your ship dedicated to weapons, but that could be a single massive laser that recharges slowly, or a tiny laser that rapid-fires a dozen times a minute. Similarly in Aurora, you can design each and every system on your vessels using technology you've unlocked. You could take a standard laser, but then give it higher fire rate and lower range and make a short range ablative gattling, extremely easily. Beyond that even, because of the way Aurora works, each ship is just a component of a fleet, so you could have different balances of one ship with sensor range, another with high-powered rifles, and another with defensive power.
This, really, is the crafting to get behind. The Minecraft mod Tinkers Construct did similar - instead of just a pickaxe, you had three components, of up to three different materials, each with their own unique stats. Some materials are downright better than others, while others are tradeoffs.
Bad crafting is Runescape - go grind a few hours in the mines and get some iron, then you just have this item.
Good crafting is based on a series of components and rules with no set outcome. Wikis can apply here, because you can easily learn 'oh, steel is better for armor than copper' but it can also get intricate, for example, if you have to choose between adding pauldrons for extra armor, or leaving them off to avoid the weight penalties.
What it really seems to come down to with crafting, in the end, is how many components are used to make a finished item, and how many components are optional. That seems to be, really, what sets apart games like Dwarf Fortress and Aurora apart from Runescape or Wurm, is how much freedom you're given to make things to your personal style, or if you're just following a build.