It would be nice to have the option to not use the harvester drones and just place a crane that outputs instead of inputting. I think that would be able to coexist just fine with the drones, because there are pros and cons to both: Do you sacrifice the potential faster inputting of having an extra crane available for a more compact but less flexible setup? The crane can't easily jump over your spaghetti to another part of the build, but it only takes up one tile instead of 25, so it could allow more much more compact setups if used right.