All valid points, and along with the somewhat underwhelming/unknown/mysterious benefits of food currently makes Cooking one of the last crafts most crafters level up. Hopefully the tooltip/char. pane changes and food revamp puts a greater focus and importance on cooking, but in the meantime here's a few tips to help you out a bit:

1) Ingredients can be a pain for sure, especially the ones that only produce 1 item as that makes it harder to recoup your expenses. Some items are pretty easily harvested, check out DoL for a pretty good resource finder: http://www.disciplesoftheland.com/Maps.aspx Otherwise, you can look to farm the mats yourself by finding out what mobs drop the item. Another good way of indirectly farming mats is to make EXP groups to kill the mobs that drop the items, for example, if you need Black Pepper, go kill the Galka abundant around Bald Knoll with a small group and ask them for any black pepper that drops. Pretty sure they give bonus SP too for being humanoid/sentient mobs.

2) Awful Machiavellian but if that's the route SE offers as the easiest means to skill up, then by all means take it. I think things only get bad in the 30+ range once its hard to skill up easily on fish. Maybe if SE introduced more fish desynths it would be a somewhat easier, albeit boring path to 50. The upcoming recipe changes may also make Cooking less complicated.

3) I do believe a community rep said they would look into the possibility of food stacking to 99. I think everyone would love to see this change, not just cooks, but anyone who buys and uses food. Also, try to skill up on stuff that people actually buy and use. There's actually a pretty good market now on higher-end foods because of the R45 dungeon, try to focus on: Grain foods like Knight's Bread, Sweets like Crowned Cake, Attack food like Meat Miq, Aldgoat Steak, Smoked Raptor, Shepherd's Pie, and Pies like Tomato Pie. Tuna Miq and Stuffed Cabbage also sell pretty well for crafters. All of the above items sell for 5k+ on my server, Crowned Cake and Knight's Bread get as high as 7-8k each at times.

Hope that helps.