It's a stochastic process, in the long run completely predictable but in the short term the imbalance could get arbitrarily large.

I generally just get rid of any excess product from it, much easier than trying to balance it perfectly. It's not like scrap is in short supply.

[edit] One more ...

Upcycling green chips on Fulgora. A factory of each quality, a few recyclers. It should run completely unattended and remain approximately in balance. Yet I keep having to dump wire in it to balance it. Likewise, upcycling supercapacitors--I'm feeding it red chips which should stay in balance, yet ...

It's possible to research the laser turret without first having researched gun turrets.

There are cases where putting it back will fail and leave the inserter holding the item--but that's what we have now. I do agree that putting it back on something that's moving isn't a good idea, but if the source is fixed I see no harm in the inserter making the attempt.

Related, if I change the ...

We can see the range of our rifle. Please, instead, the range of the currently selected weapon and the range of any thrown weapon we are holding. It's hard to eyeball it because it depends on the zoom level.