TL;DR
Smart robots that can craft simple things the player requests.What ?
There should be better robots that can themselves craft items. E.g., if I request Iron Chests they should be able to find some iron plates in yellow chests and craft the Iron chests themselves before delivering them to me. Initially they can only craft things for which all ingredients are available in yellow chests.With later research, maybe they could cooperate and find other smart robots to craft the prerequisites.
They probably should not be able to handle fluids, so electric engines would still need an assembler. Robots have cracks and if fluids get in there they will break.