Factorio Forums

A search showed that one person has suggested this but no one seemed to reply to his post.

Currently Long handed inserters are slower than the fast/smart inserters, and as a result people tend to avoid using them. I think they are super useful and should have upgrades to fast and smart long handed inserters so that side-by-side belts can be used more often.

I think the long handed inserter's long range is granted as a tradeoff against the speed (and "intelligence") of the short ranged options. I don't think it's necessary to have a fast/smart long handed inserter added to the vanilla game since it's easily and quickly moddable into the game as suggested by DaveMcW.

If you only want smart inserters of the base game, you can download my Smart Inserters mod. The regular smart inserter is already fast, so I just added the smart basic inserter and the smart long-handed inserter.