itch.io

You can turn off the category window completely which will make it sort all available items/weapons/armors that can be used into the main window. I think it'll probably list everything the player has though, so if you never plan to use weapons or armors or key items as ingredients, it might not work for you. I'm not at home right now, but there already was an option to add custom categories to that window as well, from yanfly item categories plugin, so it shouldn't be too difficult for me to modify that a bit and make that configurable.

There is a run once on completion uh... code box, that lets you run a script call after the craft completes. There is a way to reset it after using it so it runs every time, but I'm not at home right at the moment to double check it for you. You could use this to turn on a switch which would trigger the common event. The main problem is that common events don't normally work from inside menus, so you'd probably need to get another plugin entirely to call an animation on the menu screen, and then call that plugin from the run once script call.

I don't think there's currently a way to disable the progress bar for just one craft category, but you could set the timer to be very short, like, one frame, and it would basically be instant. I can consider making this more configurable in an update.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the two black bars, is this because you have the window skins hidden and it's showing something weird that'd normally be hidden?

~Ramza