I've been having a read through of a few of the topics in in the Discussion, and in many cases, it feels very much like the focus is on getting IR3 to work with Space Age, which personally I agree with doing. As you've no doubt noticed, IR3 doesn't lend itself well to this. Recycling/Scrapping, Quality, Deep Spce Mining...etc.

Therefore, does it make any sense to perhaps have two patchsets?
- Vanilla 2.0 + El-Rail support, aka. "The classic IR3 experience", just in 2.0
- Space Age integrated, ie. makes several necessary design changes to its "plot", aka. those that integrate its flow into that of Space Age's progression with respect to smoothing the resource/item incompatibility hurdles that come with it. Choices such as disabling the Scrapper in favor of the the actual Recycler, or encouraging the player to bring tin with them, mine it from asteroids in space, or adding tin as a spoil-resource for iron and copper stromatolite on Gleba. As for Quality, yes, quite a few entities would need to be revisited, and given some compatible properties to utilize it.

Its a bit of a technical-debt timesink, but it would allow you to context-lock one such patchset to provide the arguably smaller and simpler Vanilla 2.0 experience, have that done, and then refocus on integrating for Space Age and co.

I actually have a post prepared for this, but I was going to wait a bit longer before publishing it. I'll do it now, right here.

EDIT: To clarify, the focus is on getting the Patchset stable and working with some of the more popular mods on the portal.

Truthfully, I'm on the fence about Space Age support. I don't have the skill or experience with IR3 to design a fitting progression path through Space Age, or to create brand new assets (and remember I can't copy Deadlock's ones). So I've been doing "background work", removing some of the obstacles (such as Quality) in case I come back in the future better equipped, or if a successor takes over this project.

Right now on Codeberg there is a bare-bones Space Age build. All of the "base" techs stay on Nauvis, you can make Cosmic analysis packs in two ways (launch the satellite, or make it on a space platform). Transmats can teleport between planets. No recipes are changed, it's compatible in a strictly technical sense only.

The plan, if it happens, is not to do a split. If you want the standard experience, you don't load the "space-age" mod.