I'm not an Armorer but here is some general advice:

1) Generally, try to be a few levels above yourself. Try to balance recipe difficulty and ability to boost quality.

Quality now gives a significant boost. If you can get around 130ish quality you should see a bonus of 100%.

I aproach crafting with the mentality of squeezing every ounce of exp that I can from each synth. Sometimes a synth five levels above you will give you more exp than one 9 levels depending on how well you're geared and what abilities you have at your disposal.

2) Still one of the great mysteries of XIV. Craftsmanship boosts the success rate of physical recipes. Magic Craftsmanship boosts the success rate of magic recipes. Which recipes are which is anyone's guess. Best bet is to find a happy medium.

Control reduces the chances of sparking or unstable elements.

If you want to know more about any stat, make sure your help text is turned on and hover over the stat in you attributes menu.

3) I mostly use Mooglebox.com. A little of Yellow Gremlin and Disciplesoftheland.com.

Problem is every few months these sites have to pretty much redo their databases. Hopefully that's done for now that SE is through the overhaul stage of 1.x.

Best thing you can do is keep at it with making use of multiple sites and use what works best for you. But don't be afraid of "dated" or "old" recipes. There're still in the game to serve as a stop gap till SE can properly fill the blanks.