Scrap Instead of Ingots

I think part of the arguing back and forth about ingots, arises from us not distinguishing between two different uses of it, that are game technically completely separate things, but we see them as one thing because of our background in Space Engineers 1. These two aspects are best demonstrated by considering two "crafting recipes":

1) Recycling materials: "Steel plates" --> "Iron something A" --> "Steel tubes"

2) Crafting parts: "Iron ore" --> "Iron something B" --> "Steel plates"

The "something" above could be ingots, or could be scrap, or could be something else. Lots of terms that would be suitable. Of course, instead of iron you can have any of the other resource types (copper, lead, etc.)

However, here's the main point: That something-A is NOT the same as something-B. Not in the crafting recipe sense. They are entirely different things for entirely different purposes.

And, I think, one major cause in our disagreements of whether ingots should be in the game or not comes from the following realization:

The "something-A" is a viable, useful, and sensible thing, and needed in the game. The "something-B" is not.

Think about it. Don't stay fixated how things were in SE1. Think about it. The crafting recipe "ore --> ingot --> part" is entirely redundant and unnecessary. Why? Because of the simple fact that there would be no other use for ore except crafting it into ingots. This means that by simply choosing the crafting costs and crafting times appropriately we can always get the exact same result for "ore to parts" as "ore to ingots to parts". They are equivalent, and thus the intermediate ingots in that crafting recipe is completely unnecessary.

The recycling crafting recipe "iron part X --> iron scrap --> iron part Y", however, is the opposite. There you can NOT make the intermediate product go away. Why? Because many iron parts can be crafted into iron scrap. If we want recycling of materials in the game, we must have this intermediate crafting product. Otherwise it's not possible as a crafting option.

My suggestion is thus this: Have "scrap" instead of "ingots".

Technically:

- Ore (iron ore, copper ore, etc.) is a source material for crafting parts

- Scrap (iron scrap, copper scrap, etc.) is a source material for crafting parts

- You can turn parts into scrap of the constituent metal type (i.e. you scrap the component into its basic metal pieces)

- Game treats "ore" and "scrap" as separate item types in inventories (easier for humans to understand what is going on)

- Game treats "ore" and "scrap" as being identical stuff when used in crafting (making it easy for the game)

And that's it. We have recycling. We have an intermediate crafting part that can "carry over" materials from part X to making part Y. Our backpack and our crafting device blocks can use scrap as a substitute for ore, and everything works, but we avoid having that unnecessary step of turning ore into something else when building. It's the best of both worlds.