Might sound a bit harsh, but hear me out. This might change the overall gameplay a bit in the same vein as oil processing did, with some of the same benefits. Miners already don't require inserters to put ores on the belts, similarly they wouldn't need any to put them in furnaces, removing the need for burner inserters for earlygame automation. You could simply connect the belt to the furnace - "but dude", you might say, "how is this better than inserters?" Furnaces are too slow to process all items from a single belt. Well, we can use bucket wheel elevators, essentially inserters with an added con of them picking up anything that happens to be on the belt at the time a bucket shovels through, not just the items needed for the furnace, and consuming 100% energy all the time. For snatching coal from the farther belt, bucket chain. Sounds eh we're not done yet.
A huge benefit would be that you could load and unload trains practically instantly.
Loading hopper cars would take a while, but to unload they'd simply dump all cargo into a dumping pit underneath the track. From there, the items would get loaded onto belts (each 2x2 tile of the dumping pit would have it's automated output, similar to miners)(alternatively, bucket wheels). Considering 90% of trains get used for transporting raw resources, this would speed the process up a fair bit and render fast inserter snatching obsolete (creeps me out to this day).
^this is the original application, I got the idea that there should be hopper cars loaded and unloaded this way first
To separate solid items and dry bulk, there'd be grate splitters, neatly filtering powdery substances to the side by violently smashing everything that goes through them against an integrated grate (I'm incredibly sorry). This would ensure that nothing but dry bulk gets caught in the bucket wheels.
Well you get the idea. Kinda like you can move large quantities of raw materials more easily (using bucket wheels for moving them around would be super fast relative to inserters since more buckets can be filled per wheel), but still, no inserters.
