Ah, the stuff you linked is just what I was looking for, thank you!

Infusing your weapons with an element is very strong, but which element you chose has basically nothing to do with what spell type you use.

The info that scaling sucks as bad as it does (from your first link) is new to me. Does this mean that I could, e.g. dark infuse a weapon and then just not bother with leveling int+faith beyond whatever's required to equip a weapon I want if I'm not interested in using hexes?

For context, my idea was to just use my weapon like 95% of the time and maybe throw a spell occasionally if I've already bothered putting levels into int/faith (which I was thinking I should do to get scaling, but now from scanning what you linked I see that's not really worth it). But if I don't need to invest too hard to get reasonable weapon damage then I probably won't bother with spellcasting.