There was a plan for a while to have descriptions for the ingredients to make it more possible to figure out recipes, for instance the darkvision potion contains both rat tail and newt eye (rats can see in the dark) and flight potion will contain dragonfly wings and fairy dew (both dragonflies and fairies can fly). however I didn't have enough time in the end to get that worked out. I also wanted to have a recipe book to show what potions it was possible to find, but that also got scrapped. Being able to buy ingredients in bulk would definitely have made sense to add as a feature.