You always have to keep in mind that there is no "real" increase in yield with the refining, for the sorted ores it is always a 1 to 1 ratio, only exception is the early smelting of the raw ores, everything else is the "loss" by having the slag as byproduct, but as BlakeMW pointed out slag is just another method/way of conversion with is slightly less efficient.
I haven't calculated all ways and steps you could take, but I don't need to if I stick to the rule of the 1 to 1 ratio. So your decision which refining steps to take and which not, or how to mix the steps in between and which way to produce a certain ore is up to your preference and probably playstyle.
Take away: You don't have to do all the refining steps just because you can do them, only upgrade your refining if you are able to handle the outputs and byproducts and think about which other ways are in the mod to get what you want.
If you look solely at the ores you might be right, but you have to consider that you will also get the waste water -> sulfur and the geodes -> gems from the floatation step, so there is more than just gems to get from it.BlakeMW wrote:...If you're genuinely interested in large quantities of the advanced ores then each more advanced step is better than the previous (although flotation is particularly weak). Otoh if you only want small quantities of specific advanced ores, then you're much better served sticking with sorting to maximize slag.
Edit:
Angels Infinite Ores
---0.3.2
-added support for Dark Matter Replicator mod
-added option to enable a loweryield mode in the config: loweryield will add a probability to the ore output of the infinite ores, so that they will produce less ore overall and even less with lower yields
-added modifier for loweryield to the config, changes the probability with which ores are produced