Does the base damage scale? This seems to be the case. I've sort of tested it: I used the console to spawn in another higher lvl version of the blade. At first it had +30 points of damage when compared to the original blade I was was using, however the ui showed that both swords had the same base damage... Then, once I left the inventory screen and brought it back up, the original (lower lvl, but I leveled up with it a number of times) sword had +2 damage when compared to the higher lvl sword. Is this a bug? What's going on?

Do you mean to say that the game was adding the charge to the damage in the UI description?

No. I meant that the game probably scaled the sword you cheated in, and the original was better because it had some charge. The UI was probably the game being confused by your antics.