Collapse it, but then sort it by material.
Like, you need x much metalsmithing experience to make iron stuff, practice on copper.
What, like, all the way? Metal skill lets you make metal walls, statues, goblets, helmets, swords, and decorations?
Not sure I like that. Almost like just having skill at manipulating a chosen element.
This, but I'd flip it. Organize everything based on material- stone, wood, metal, bone, cloth, gem, etc. Then divide those materials into things you can make out of them- Stone might go Furniture->Construction->Crafts->Bodywear, while Cloth might go Bodywear->Crafts->Furniture->Construction.
This is... interesting, but I'm not sure I want something as complex as a progression chart for each skill (though, if there's only like 5 that's less of an issue...).
To address the "furniture vs construction" question, I'd ask how significantly do those things differ. Is there quality levels, such that it is possible to make a really nice chair (but maybe not a wall,) or is it all pass/fail? What kind of mechanical benefit does furniture confer- are we talking like a Sims thing where it fills needs, or does it fill needs for NPCs, or is it just necessary to do things (workbenches et al.) If the only furniture you're contemplating is workbenches and storage and the like, they can probably be collapsed under Construction.
Ah. Yes, I suppose this requires some context.
In theory the players could probably just wander off and do whatever, but the default idea is basically for them to create their own little village, so the Sims thing is probably fairly accurate for both players and NPCs. I'm still working out the details, but the general idea is that the players give themselves nice stuff for various benefits, and then give their NPC mooks nice stuff either to similarly motivate them or increase their efficiency, or because NPC mooks start grumbling and not working or somesuch if their stuff starts seeming too paltry compared to other peoples' stuff.
As for quality levels, yes but I'm unsure of the specifics. More on that below, but essentially, I'm not sure if
every item will be subject to some sort of quality modifier based on raw worksmanship, or if that'll only apply to specific luxury items where half the point is how great it is.
Obviously, the above only applies to the "makin' stuff" skills. Depending on how you want to work it, you might have it arranged such that attempts to try a task without appropriate skill are doomed to failure (making a stone hat without any skill in Stonework would autofail) or you could make it so that tasks without skill are just much more likely to fail, or that tasks with skill produce better/useful results. If you've had more thoughts on what exactly skills do for a player mechanically (or have already mentioned it and I glossed over,) I would be most keen to read them.
As with everything, that's not completely nailed down yet, but for gathering and combat skills, at least, skill level equals magnitude of the effect. Combat damage is the difference between the attacker's and defender's rolls multiplied by the attacker's attack skill, for instance, and the average amount of material collected will generally be equal to whatever skill someone's using to gather with. In either case, equipment or other conditions can raise or lower that.
In the case of construction/crafting, things get a bit trickier because I pretty much have to come up with an arbitrary scale at some point, ie a Small Tent requires 10 points of construction or a Pristine Ruby requires a magnitude 15 crafting roll. The original intent was pretty much just that, mundane constructions required a certain number of points and materials dumped into them, luxury/fancy works allowed a certain number of rolls to hit whatever value they'd hit, but I'm still pondering the specifics. For instance, it's also occurred to me that perhaps
every player construction/craft should be swingy and unpredictable, and if you want a reliable design you need to assign NPCs to the task.