Yeah, essentially, the worst kind of breakage is built straight into core, as evidenced by poor playtesting(the original playtesters reportedly never used wild shape for combat, used the animal companion as a scout and mostly used summoning and blasting spells). That's the kind of broken that can actually affect your day to day gameplay. I had a druid 2 walk into a fight meant for a party of 4(2 players have gone MIA), with only a rogue 1 for backup once. The fight still went my way, despite being a closer call than I'd like.
Things like the Find the City bomb, Haunt Shifting into X, etc generally should have set off alarm bells when you ask them what they're doing with the trick(basic idea, if you ask them and they refuse to tell the DM what it's for, it's probably fishy). Things like Polymorph less so, until you turn into a Hydra and make mincemeat of the monster your fighter was pounding to little effect.
However, more on topic, there isn't really a means of accelerating mundane crafting short of using magic. Nobody gives a damn about it, so published crafting rules are rare(when you're working with 'magical' raw materials, you generally can afford Fabricates to do the work). Heck, the bulk of Craft skill use I know of in actual play are for the Minor/Major Creation, Polymorph Any Object, Fabricate, Stone Shape, etc spells, since mundane crafting isn't very meaningful to the game in terms of player power. So you're down to A)going around(craft a magic mithril full plate using raw mithril as the material) B) going through(Fabricate or something similar to forge it with magic) C) change the game(talk to your DM and come up with a usable houserule)
Plus, as most of these items are themselves magical, you could just use the magic item creation rules and use the value in raw ore/ingots as the gp cost, which is then shaped into the item desired.