As someone who recently figured some of this out myself, a bit of additional info here;
By each main gate in Haven are crafting stations. North only has weapon and shield stations but has a handy Book Vendor who buys just about everything, and south has more variety in stations but the vendors only buy more specific items. Bank access is easy for each gate.
No crafted weapon/tool/armor can be sold. You can destroy multiple crafted things in one go by dragging more things outside of the inventory, and the confirmation window will update as you go. You can remove something from the list by dragging it again, which is helpful if the Yes/No boxes go off the screen (you can't hit Esc to remove the window).
Tool Shaft crafting has the Torch and Pickaxe head options in the crafting table. Woodcutting Axe is a head option available for 1H Axe Shafts, but not tool or 2H axe shafts.
Each craft rewards the same amount of experience regardless of the materials used. Find what uses the least materials for a given product you want to level and spam it.
Durability is the only mechanical thing that matters in gathering. Any weapon will yield as much metal or wood as a pickaxe, but pickaxes tend to have vastly superior durability. On that note, different materials grant different durability to the finished product; so far I've found that if you can harvest more in a single attempt, the durability it grants to an item is lower. So as far as I can tell, Whitewood is an excellent tree to harvest for getting materials to level skills and to vendor but the items it makes are often not good to use.
I hope that they put woodcutting axe as a head option for the tool shaft, because I do feel a bit silly mining wood XD
