Most of the imbalance in fluid wagon vs cargo wagon and belted barrels vs pipes stems from barrels holding too much liquid while stacking too high.FalcoGer wrote: A wagon full of barrels should never be more than a wagon full of liquid.
Generally barrels need some reworking, they allow more throughput in a yellow belts than with pipes, they allow higher quantity per area, they allow to transport more in trains with less wagons. And they allow partitioned transportation of up to 40 different fluids per wagon.
So basically except for the one time effort of making barrels and putting up the emptying and filling machines, barrels are now, again, better than tanker wagons in every way.
To be balanced barrels should hold at most 50l when keeping stack size at 10. Barreling should fill/empty 5 or 10 barrels per recipe.