Topic is what it is, I guess it is just a question of game balance. It would seem more consistent to me for all fluid receiving assemblers to also have outputs the way the sulfuric acid drill does.

With the 5 to 6 setup you first describe, I do not understand how you expect anything to come out on the bottom 6th belt. With all the output priorities set as such, shouldn't it be impossible to fill the last belt? All 5 inputs will go to the top 5 outputs.

Not really a huge issue in most cases, but when feeding a fully beaconed copper or green assembly, I use multiple stack inserters to avoid gaps in thruput while the arm is swinging because they only activate when the internal buffers is less than 2x the recipe, but at those speeds that is too quick.

It's useful to have global production statistics because it gives you a ballpark of what resources are being used 100%, etc.

But it'd be nice to be able to highlight a local area and find out its resource consumption/production to know how much more one might need, etc.

I think my biggest issue with this is... it just doesn't make logical sense. Yes, I agree that building creative setups out of a minimal number of pieces is part of the appeal of factorio. But, let's imagine you're an engineering designing a product line of belt pieces to sell. Would you: A) Design...

I see no need for a new device; belts could just have a context sensitive option to zipper out at the end of a T, or even at just a right angle.

The current means of unmerging two halves is complicated but most of all completely non-intuitive to a new player. If all it takes is belts to merge, it should only take belts to unmerge. I see it as simple as a 5th rotation option that only appears when a belt is placed at a T-intersection. Or even...