The ability quests should give you credit if you've already made it. Lots of these are just a waste of orbs. (And they seem like they're meant to be a type of tutorial anyway.)
The worst part is that you have to do them to unlock the later ones. You can't get the quest to hone Firaga until you create Fire, then hone Fire, then create Fira, then hone Fira, then create Firaga. So if you're sitting on a rank 4 Firaga that you want to upgrade, you have to do all that other shit before honing your Firaga will give you credit.
Of course you could just hone it anyway, then eventually clear out the quest and hone the R1 Firaga you just created, but in the long run, that's an even *bigger* waste of orbs, because it means honing your R4->R5 Firaga in addition to a R1->R2 that you otherwise would never have honed.
It's not a complete waste of orbs, because many of the black magic creation quests give you an orb of the next tier. So in a way it's actually worth it. Like the quest to create Blizzara requires you to use 5 Lesser Black and 8 Lesser Ice, but the reward is 8 3* Ice Orbs. And the Hone quests generally return all the orbs of the primary element as the reward. But it's still annoying
