As far as creating your own equipment, I still think that FF 7 had a very good method with Materia (ever tried to max out all the materia? now that's time consuming, especially if you miss two boss battles for the enemy skills materia), if only it'd be applied to equipment making.
I never really bothered with enemy skills...but I managed to max every materia while morphing the stuff in the sunken submarine. It wasn't really hard, considering I had only maxed str and vit on a few chars.
I truly hated trying to get good stats on the holy sword. Even though I did, I found the god sword even better.
