Stay very far away from crafting. It can produce nightmares you didn't knew exist in Entropia. And the worst is, it will taint your game experience for a long time, it gets a serious effort to get away from it and get back to normal turnover.
Those being said, is the most complicated and beautiful thing which you can do in EU, comparable only with trading.
I don't know an answer for quantity vs. condition despite throwing in total alot of hours, money and nerves at it. To give a glimpse, worst day ever was depositing 1k$ at noon and at midnight I had left a few bps worth maybe 1k ped, if even. In another era I took a 10k oreamp-101(L) on quantity. Before explosives, these were the go-to for "gambling", just that it was less gambling if you gave it a bit of thought. Still risky though, even on quantity.
The biggest problem is the CoS which nowadays varies like crazy. Sure that on big turnover it averages qty vs cond, but that big turnover might be more than a decent human being could dedicate to it. A good rule of thumb is to never push it. Watch what big crafters do, you will never see any of them doing anything for too much time. By crafters I mean crafters of items, not EP clickers.
You need four things: skills, maxed bp, math and money. The money aspect is the easiest to clear. If you are selling an item say worth 40 ped and you have 30 slots in auction, that's 1200 ped off the bat. Then you need to count the MU for the residue, average cost of bp, apply a 32 or whatever CoS and that's it. Then, you need something for the skilling while you wait for items to sell and something for stacks of materials/items which you need. It can spiral out very fast if you don't control it and stay in a very limited number of blueprints.
For general feeling, I would rather recommend mining your way up to mineral sense and only then consider crafting. You will get to see some swings in economy, you will get to see a different market to hunting and you get to know people if you trade your stuff. And you'll get some nice engineering from mining.
Nomatter what way you go, you need to stalk the auction for hours. You need to see the speed of circulation for many items and materials even before taking a decision.
Looking back, I would recommend to rather buy the skills and a maximized blueprint and go from there. Preferably a component which is used in these ArMatrix blueprints. Even if is a losing proposition (very low level blueprint, high competition eager to undercut even their mothers etc), if is a few hundred ped turnover per day is a cheap thing to do while you gather experience.
At least for ArMatrix, clicking on condition is a no-go because of all MU involved in ingredients and because they're exclusively from (L) clicks and that can be extra MU. In general, the difference is that if a hof tends to pay residue mostly, you lose all the MU from uncrafted items, even if tt is the same. But Entropia always has small secrets and corners and sometimes it can be worthy to risk. But only sometimes. There is no such thing as crafting on full condition save for EP1 and who knows what item where all MU considered, would result to be worthy. Crafting stackables is itself a separate topic and you need to test for yourself what works and that costs so much money that nobody would give a clear answer if it would exist.
From all crafters I saw in 12 years, only a handful resisted until today. And considering those active, is actually only one, Auktuma. Is incredibly hard, I cannot stress this enough and is incredibly easy to overestimate your understanding and confuse luck with norm.
Lastly, given that they did announced a revamp for both mining and crafting, I would suggest to not do any kind of commitment larger than some 1-2k in a few low maxed bps and skills to top them off. It's anyway a thing to do for years if you get at it, no need to rush anywhere.
Apologies for the unsolicited wall of text