Often I want all chests to be depleted\filled at the same rate, so setups like the one shown below don't help me, as the middle chests of each group of 6 will empty fastest.
My first idea was to somehow use the loaders from creative but soon realized they would drastically simplify many other belt-balancing problems that I think really add to the game.
The next thing I came up with, was a double armed stack-inserter (fixed at a 180° angle), which with the full capacity-upgrades would be able to fill a compressed blue belt !!on one side!! (so you need 2 of them to load/unload a fully compressed blue belt). This inserter would have a grabber on each arms, so that when one arm is grabbing items, the other can put the ones down, he picked up before.
The price for this could be really expensive, so that it would only be used if necessary, for example 2 stack-inserters, 1 processing unit and 1 speed module (maybe some additional lubricant) and have huge power consumption. This price would be ok as you need your base to rely on blue belts before consider using those insterters, which is rather lategame. For the research, I would suggest that logistics 3 and automation 3 are required and it costs 500 hundred science packs.
The goal of this would be, to decrease the size of the bulky yet uncomplicated belt-chest and chest-belt setups without taking away complexity in other areas, explicitly lane balancers etc. should not be impacted by this.
What do you think of this idea or what would you add/tweak?
Here the promised setup
