Let's be honest here: of all the things obtuse about the game the crafting is damn near the lowest. Certainly it pales compared to many MMOs where there's millions of items to harvest then use to make whatever, here it's simply the weapon, an ore, and maybe a soul. The biggest problem was how spread out the smiths were, and consolidating that again (one regular one, one specialized one, or just one period) would do wonders.
You may have a point about figuring out what weapons you can use to upgrade with a soul, in which case... give an option to display currently available upgrade paths, I guess? That's about it I'd think.
It's not inherently BAD if you need to look up information online, but it does need to be for stuff that's meant to be hidden or whatever, IE the embers, versus how to use something in the first place like the stat requirements/scaling.
To be fair you simply shouldn't be doing something like THAT. Ever.