Manufacturing Mode Alternate Trades#5240

I love the idea of unlocking alternate trades and creating more complex shapes to give better ratios, but with the current balance the juice does not seem worth the squeeze. Margins on the early alternate trades are small and polishing waste is easy to scale up, so it’s often easier to just copy paste to double production. I’ve launched about 300 vortex platforms now with just the default trades and am looking at alternate trades to speed up launches, but even the amethyst recipe requires me to replace 2 shape factories with 4 (that are all more complicated) just for the privilege of saving half my aquamarine. I would be much more interested in alternates if they doubled the output, since I could halve the number of factories as a reward for producing more complex shapes. Also, I’ve used less than half of the waste belts and it does not feel necessary to use the alternate waste production recipe.