I use the repair turret a lot because I like it as a conceptual endgame upgrade for automated defences, but the UPS cost starts to become truly unbearable at one point. This may not be a complete fix but it helps justify keeping the mod installed for a little while longer.
There is only so much that can be done to optimize when all we got is the (SLOW!) LUA api, if we got full access to c++ engine, damn would that be awesome