Good ideas, I really like the meaty and powerful feel I get from drawing a bow full strength in a game. I feel it’s a lot more fulfilling than the ‘pewpew’ quickfire bow-guns that come around every now and then.
In addition, I quite liked the crossbow mechanic a game called War of the Roses used (note: War of the Roses is not that good a game imho, but this mechanic was cool).
In it, you’d be presented with a ‘minigame’ when you’d reload your crossbow and would reload faster if you’d match a rotating ‘hook’ with on a certain area. Basically match a spinning line with a segment of a circle, justified in-game as the ratchet of the crossbow mechanism. In parts, this is similar to Gears of War’s active reload mechanic.
In addition to adding a little more skill to even the simplest thing like reloading, with the crafting system you’ve suggested, perhaps different firing mechanisms could exist as a variable/craftable part of crossbows.
These mechanisms might have different passive reload speeds, difficulties (speed of rotator/sizes of segment) of the minigame, different bonuses from successfully completing the minigame, and connected to these differening times differing damages. E.g., a windlass mechanism, a lever mechanism, or just hand-drawn.
