Was this something that Bethesda was planning to flesh out more since as it is it seems pretty useless. You need the Sigil Stone to make anything really useful and when you have that you're at such high levels that you can make the items it makes through simpler methods. I guess you could spam Conjuration early on to get cool Daedric stuff but that seems like such a boring route to go. If there we're a couple cool items that you could only get through use of the forge then its implementation would be justified. Am I missing something about this that I am unaware of?

I thought nobody used it.

Your not missing anything, it really is just that useless.