Regarding stat caps and the affixal of materia to gear

I have a question regarding stat caps and the affixal of materia to gear that hopefully some kind person can help me with.

As most of you probably know, there is a cap for every(?) stat that can be added to gear through the melding of materia. If you have an item and materia in question already in your possession you can test to see if it will allow it, and how much it will allow through the meld menu, however this obviously isn't the most efficient method imaginable for the purposes of min-maxing as endgame materia and meldable gear can be very time consuming and/or expensive to obtain.

My question is, are there any other means to determine what the caps of any given stat would be on meldable gear? Is there a formula? Is there some other in-game way of determining this that I've just overlooked? If not, are there any community works that cover this, such as a spreadsheet, or post somewhere?

I understand their goal was probably to make it so nothing melded could ever be better than endgame gear such as AF2 etc, but some craftable items with the right quintuple melds can be the best-in-slot until the acquisition of better and more difficult to obtain gear.

If anyone can provide any information here it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you, and have a happy Halloween.

*[disclaimer] I posted this in the general section appropriately in my opinion in lieu of there being no forum dedicated directly to melding, and also because I feel that this is an important subject that would probably just go almost completely unseen in one of the much lower traffic sub-forum categories such as crafting*

There are a few exceptions such as a few crafting and possibly gathering pieces, but read this, it's pretty thorough if not a little old:

http://www.abaddon.us/phpBB3/page.php?p=melding-guide