The game does not load, when hard crafting is disabled. You write, that it is based on hard crafting, but it is no dependency, right? Well for me it won't start without it or fail to load with an error.
Activating both on the other hand is leading to having duplicate technologies, e.g. steel. One from hard crafting and one from thorough processing.

I changed Hard crafting. And get this mod.
At the very beginning it was not many differences between this two mods.
It was changed over 50% of original mod, now.
But conflict with Hard crafting is still possible.