I think that the flat style came from a very vocal minority, and then from those chasing trendiness. It very obviously eliminates visual communication, and I also am glad to see it lose relevance.

I view these divisions of production as the major independent units I need to connect, using belts/pipes as needed: Miners Smelters Oil/plastic/battery center Circuit production Mall Research Tons of iron/copper belts go into circuit production. 1 lane of each intermediate product (2 lanes of gears)...

Most malls that I see are these massive, one dimensionally sprawling, bus-and-tap behemoths. Having done the work to categorize all the ingredients into specific belts in 0.16 and build one more my style, I've now progressed in 0.17 to where it's ready to be served with the new version's changes: ma...

This runs red & green science, plus fills chests for Inserters Yellow belts Gears Green circuits which let you hand-build early game items quickly. The first phase is fed from manually filled chests: early-game.png Once you have enough belts and make a single underground belt, it can start to fe...