The crafting system gets really tedious when I'm trying to constantly improve my equipment and it takes 5 minutes to find a recipe that I'm looking for if I don't already have all of the ingredients. Is it possible for you to include an item filter by creating a slot to put an item in and filtering to recipes that contain that item in the slot? It would be a great help to know what items to look for to finish a recipe and craft new items.
All of what Alimarin said, pretty much. The list of recipes gets absurdly long to scroll through especially if you run a dozen or more mods on your plays. Another thing that would ease crafting management would be filters for equip slots and weapon types (for blacksmiths and tinkerers in particular)
Right now, not really. Your chance might be higher if you pester Nicholas (known as "Nicholas") or David (known as "dbaumgart") so I recommend doing just that (just try to be gentle since they are the developers, and good luck).
...just bear in mind, rumour has it Dredmor UI changes tend to involve wailing, teeth-gnashing, blood oozing from the walls, spontaneous kitten combustion and intrusions into our reality by eldritch beings. Though really, we don't mind the last one quite so much, so long as they keep bringing GLG more of the CE design documents.
Bah. Just use Dredmorpedia and/or the wiki. At this point, the developers are so caught up in CE that they've basically put their collective foot down and said "no new non-bugfix programming for Dredmor, at least for a long time."