The new UI work looks amazing and I can't wait to get my grubby little hands on it!
Now a not-so-short rant about spidertron.
I'm just fine with spidertron not being actively worked on for the v1.0 release. That said...
As far as what seems to be one of the big issues with the design, if you don't want it to look silly while moving quickly you could use different speeds on the up/down stroke of the legs while running. Effectively giving the "vehicle" two different cadences to it's movement.
e.g. At or near top speed (or whatever speed begins to really look silly), you could begin to change the speed of the up stroke where the leg is being lifted. Keep the down stroke of the leg quick, but slow the up stroke so imply some "hang" time in the air. I think this would allow the same awesome inserter-leg design, and prevent such scrambled flailing when moving at speed.
In my eyes this implementation could be similar to a simply great mod;
Progressive Running, that effectively gives you two speeds. If spidertron were given the same treatment, you could give spidertron the movement from
FFF120 at low speed:
And with either a configurable key press or time based threshold, change the cadence into more of a gallop but with more legs to even out the stride:
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And as far as not really having a "niche" for spidertron to fit into... I'd love to leverage a "vanilla" way to obsolete my want of the infamous
Squeak Through mod. Everyone (and every powerpole) knows what happens when you drive a car/tank through a factory. I would love to swap to spidertron for moving around the main section of the base. Or maybe instead of the mechanic of stacking so many exoskeletons, let spidertron be a togglable/deployable piece of suite equipment that you can enable or deploy to easily move about the base.
Just thinking out load here, but after initially installing so many QoL mods, I found I'd effectively rounded off a few too many corners, and the game became a little too "soft." Along these lines, I've been going through my modlist and finding ways to make myself work for the QoL nicety, instead of allowing the mod to just hand it to me for "free." For example, I've come to love
Armor Reach as it emphasizes the importance of upgrading your suit, and gives me some thing back for going through the hassle of researching, and crafting the equipment.
I've felt that squeak through some what removes a bit too much "texture" from the base, allowing you to just breeze through so many obstacles on the ground (like pipes). I know, I know, this is why the mod exists, but I'd personally rather have to "earn" these types of QoL features through in-game mechanics.
Spidertron would be something you have to earn via technology and building the equipment itself.
Squeak Through's existence and popularity are evidence that the "want" is there for the feature. I think spidertron would be a way to "solve" this problem in-game.