When I go to craft a shovel, I impulsively arrange the tool head and handle like this:

As can be seen in the screenshot, this does not work. I propose that this should be made to work, either through making the recipe for tools shapeless or by allowing sticks diagonally adjacent to tool heads to work.

Crafting recipe related issues should use #63.
That said, this was not a feature in 1.7.10 iirc, and I don't see why it should be in 1.12.