after some funny effects (like really slow and really longhanded inserters when throwing items to the east or south) and the last few updates, it seems to work now, and is a really nice and fun way of transportation for items and players :-)

but to make it really useful, transport by throwing should be a bit faster than it is now. currently, a chain of inserters and chests requires a few more items/resources to build, but is already a bit faster at first and with inserter bonus and faster or stack inserters it is even much(!) faster and has a multiple of the throughput. maybe you can add a mod setting for this parameter too, and/or increase the default speed somewhat so that it is roughly comparable with an inserter/chest chain of blue inserters that have some stack bonus. or maybe the throwing pads could get that stack bonus for throwing 1/2/3 items too.

similar also applies to throwing the player: walking on paved ground (even with no speed bonus from artificial legs in the armor) is roughly as fast as throwing, but throwing has some additional limitations (chain of jump pads, exact locations, destroying what is at the landing spot) so that the transport itself should be at least as using a paved road.
another disadvantage of the launch pads is that they are a bit difficult to operate: i have to walk onto them, target the pad with the mouse, and then also push a hotkey. together with their low speed, they are not suitable for improved/faster transport. they only might enable me to automatically go to a destination instead of walking, and taking an AFK break in the meantime. thus please increase also that speed (it still doesn't need to be and shouldn't be some kind of instant teleport :-)
maybe operating them could be made easier, eg automatically jumping (without a hotkey) when you step on them, or jumping with a hotkey also when you are not standing exactly on them but up to one tile next to them and/or don't target them with the mouse (in addition to standing on them). the current version is really nice and fun as proof of concept, but not yet easy enough to use to be really useful in the long run (for me!)

finally the destruction of items you land on: this is a nice penalty, but ghosts (at least the ghost of bounce pads) should not be destroyed when you just have placed them and land on them before a bot has built them. btw: landing on launch pads doesn't destroy them. maybe for player transport they could automatically launch the player in a specific direction and thus players would need a series of launch pads while items need the inserters and bounce pads ?
when building a series of inserters/bouncers for item transport, it can become tricky to join/split a series of them and/or change direction. i would prefer to have inserters throw items one tile less than bounce pads so that it is easy to replace a bounce pad by an open chest where items can land and another inserter (eg to join another transport line, or to let items continue in another direction)

as always with a mod that is new and needs some balancing and finetuning, it is your mod and you might have different ideas than i have. thus take all of the above only as hints what i was thinking when just starting to use the mod in some test setups ...

That's a lot of detail, thanks for the feedback. I never did speed comparisons but I agree it does make sense to have higher tiers of throwers. The current speed of thrown items is based on how satisfying it felt to look at for me lol

I thought about making the launchers automatic and chainable at one point but since you can't break out of a launch I thought people might use them to trick their friends into launching themselves into water or something deadly and limiting automatic jumping to the initial direction would limit that. Though I would agree that having to hover the launcher to use it is maybe unnecessary.

I actually didn't know the landing destroyed ghosts too, I'll see what's causing that.

i once tried how to build a fast belt replacement with bobs inserters and chests, resulting in 6 parallel chests on every second tile along the desired path, with a warehouse at each end (thus the width of 6), and bobs inserters (set to the smallest angle and longest arm length (for the smallest turning angle), and if i remember correctly i achieved a throughput of 54k items per minute :-) LOL ... (for comparison, vanilla belts are 900, 1800 and 2700)

similar to you, i enjoy watching my factory and nice effects a lot, including these launchers. but when i tried to use them for any real transport tasks, they simply were too slow.

and yes, automatic launching in different directions could easily lead to jumping in an endless square (or other pattern). but even "only" using the bump pads to continue jumping in a straight line can annoy ennemies (or yourself if you accidentally trigger this), with lots of bump pads hidden in a forest ... :-)

do you know the mods that allow bots to use/build blueprints and also delete items? trigger such a blueprint builder with a gate, and let bots rebuild a chain of bump pads, either extending their range endlessly (the bots removing and rebuilding pads "on the fly" while they accompany you when being thrown along? :-) or deleting a critical jump pad on an island and thus the enemies getting stuck there :-)