Yeah to make NEI support work properly it would need to be M * N instead of 1, which is quite literally an O(n²) lookup in the Crafting Manager. (iterates through all recipes asking for if it matches every single time until it hits a working Recipe)
The only way to properly fix it is to rewrite the NEI Crafting Plugin (and potentially some core functionality of NEI itself) to be able to show things like this properly.
Edit: And even then the Issue of Information Overload would still be a thing, since clearly you dont want a list of hundreds of Recipes to inspire yourself of crafting a Tool from a specific Material that you happen to stumble upon.