You can craft better weapons and armor than you can find, but it's not mission critical.
You don't need to have the skills yourself, you get companions and there's a wizard with high intelligence that's very suitable. Just don't use automatic leveling and make him the craftsman.

Crafting *is* a minigame, and one I dislike in all games where crafting is non-essential. It tends to divert your focus, and for people like me (and you, I suspect) it is overly complicated -- for crafting buffs, it's undoubtedly not complicated enough. You don't need it; if you don't like crafting, ignore it completely and sell that stuff.

Short answer: if you don't want to craft, you don't need to.

In general, crafted items will be far more powerful than the ones you find. It's not necessary to win the game, and quite honestly it erodes at the difficulty a bit much for my liking (I'd compare it to cheating for significantly higher stats). Wizards and Clerics make the best crafters, as any magical item worth crafting requires the crafter to be a spellcaster and have access to a specific spell to complete the recipe.

There are some specialized character builds that need really specific magic items to function. For instance, many low-strength monk builds are dependent on having monk weapons (such as the kama) with large amounts of elemental damage. Characters such as these are the only ones with a serious claim to actually needing crafting. Most characters will do fine with just some generic equipment they scraped off the dungeon floor.

I have not done much crafting either, but there are a lot of great resources out there.

Here is a recipe guide from the Neverwinter Vault.

http://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn2/other/nwn2-crafting-recipes-pdf

A crafting faq by Offkorn. This faq also talks about creating a PC build dedicated to crafting.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/617931-neverwinter-nights-2-platinum/faqs/45560

And then crafting is different again in MotB and again different in SoZ.
(simpler, more powerful and more fun in both of these, than in base NWN2)

Main game: On your first run you should avoid it - there are too many issues you'ld have to take care about.
MotB: You can beat the game without crafting, but the system is so easy that it's worth a try nevertheless. But avoid any perfectionsm here: you can become really overpowered and thereby harm the game experience.