The target wouldn't be to compete with prod modules as a mechanic, since they're already best at what they do, but to provide a smoother way for quality to benefit your factory in a unique way, logistics density. Right now, there's a contention around cargo wagons and their difficulty keeping up ...

The station connection via circuit is more a 'feel good' type of interface for selecting which station to track to point the wagon index at, it could very well be just a ui link that gave you a list of all stations to pick from, or the aura type interface similar to how cybersyn does their ...

TL;DR
Rather than discrete items per quality, utilize the concepts of drain and durability similar to science packs, ammo, and spoilage


What?
A normal iron ore is a 1:1 for a normal iron plate, but an 'uncommon' iron ore would last for more than 1 cycle, with that durability increasing like ...

I've been on the hunt for more implementations of proxy-container based inventory connections, and one place I think it would excel at is presenting per wagon inventories to train stations. The idea would something along one of these two ideas based on some of the sources I've been trying to parse ...

There are a few things the system should have in order to improve things for better usability, and they likely have code in engine already that could be used to solve them:

Cargo (Any Wagon)
Cargo (All Wagons)

This is similar to the Fuel count difference and critical for more complex networks ...

Apologies if this is considered a necro or not, but I was about to suggest my own thread and found this one during searching. I would like to throw my vote in for removing 'slots' as a display concept in chests and instead start using it as a figure to show 'density', especially for the upcoming 2.0 ...

Had this idea myself creating a station, and completely agree!

at run-time

Ah, thank you, that indeed answers my questions regarding possible or not


https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Manifolds

I had not seen this before, thank you! I'll be taking a look at it

FluidMustFlow does something interesting with its internal buffers in the ducts that may be ...

I've been trying to search for it, but I don't think I know the lingo enough to be looking correctly. I've read that large inventories are bad on UPS because of the methods inserters use to find empty spaces to put items. I've also seen 'compression' chests that densifies items down into one slot ...