The smithing system is fine as is is, needs some little tweaking though.
I love smithing as a process - i literally spend hours in a smithy. And I don't want to play the game without me personally smithing and smelting all the stuff. Nothing fun about giving orders for the craft to NPC and wait. Just boring.
Stamina system must stay the same, because it's great, time passing is already enough. Time passing for each piece will ruin the fun and will require in-game years of craft. ( Tourneys can take half an hour or so though.)
I agree that selling price must be lowered, for now its ridiculous that 5 good-ish swords can deplete traiders economy.
Thanx to the existing unpredictable system smithing feels like a gamble, like opening lootboxes and that is cool. Yes, rates of learning the parts may be improved a little, but even with the existing system they are fine as is. If you buy it from some smith, its just dull. Then you will get true repetitiveness, because there will be no more hoping and wishing for it when you press the "Forge" button.
I would add a slider to refining though - thousands clicking for every component are too much though. At least let a player chose number of batches - 5-10 pieces, for example.
The smithing is quite simple and not complicated at all (but now it requires too much clicking, hence my suggestion of batches button). If you dont want to smith - just buy stuff from traders - it's more than enough for battles.
