They really deserve more attention. You oughta enable them by default and make it more obvious what they do, either in game or in the description here. I'm still early game so I can't test everything, but if I did my math right it looks like using steel doubles your effective output per iron plate, and using engines triples your output per iron plate.

I just think this should be more known.

I'm glad you like them. They aren't enabled by default because they're rather silly and may be unbalanced, so I didn't want to emphasize them too much.