Recommendation 2: The base Item Drive holds a total count of 4K items, which is a little more than what a Steel Chest can hold. I kind of agree that it's a little bit small. Even if I increase the max capacity 4 times, you'd still need to have a line anyway albeit less.
Recommendation 3: I'm not sure I understand what you mean by being able to place the ports in the same compartment on the left and right sides. If you mean to ask if I can make it possible to allow the ability to add multiple IO connections to a given cable so that you can have up to 3 Item Ports on one block for instance, then I could make that happen. The main issue that I have in trying to implement that idea is it would require over 50% rewrite of the current code and it might crash existing saves because of the massive changes. There might be a way to add a legacy code to prevent it from happening but it's going to be very challenging to do. Not impossible, but extremely hard in the current state of the mod version.