Welcome Mark, and Happy New Year! Glad you find the forging reference helpful.
1. "file error: data may have been lost" - I get this every time. Not sure why, but it still seems to be complete.
2. Master Alchemist - Yes, there's a gem --> gold benefit, but no gem --> gem benefit. A very niche pretender, I understand.
3. empowerment - No, unfortunately nothing helps with empowerment, but I've heard one of the heroes gets some kind of empowerment bonus...for example, it's only 30 gems to empower to level 3, etc. Maybe someone can confirm?
4. Jaguar pretender - Out of my pay grade. Anyone?
5. Magic Path Boosting spreadsheet - I don't believe there are any formal documents, but the boosts are listed in Edi's fantastic dom3_db, so I usually just use the "Filter" in Excel to find what I need. DEFINITELY checkout sector24's awesome
Booster Guide. But you'll have all those boosters memorized in short order anyways
As far as other information sources, if you've found the strat index, you're in the right place.
Snoddasmannan's web version of DrPraetorious's spell database isn't to be missed. Hidden tomes of knowledge include Edi's Better Independant's mod, which is a great guide to which indys are good and which should be avoided, and QM's CBM mod, which does that for everything.
But really, Dom3 is a baptism by fire game. Dive into MP! There's no better way to learn it.
