So, I kind of suspected this was the case already. But until now I never had a tantalum shortage. I'm not going to say it is game-breakingly limiting, but it is, currently, my most desired refinery output.
It could, in theory, be useful for a very brief period after tier 2 refining, provided you chose to prioritise this technology over tier 3 refining, which would boost all resources substantially. By the final tier of refining, you are far better to not implement it, and just destroy niobium by the bucket load.
I don't have a super simple solution, but one option is to output pure tantalum at 14 for 10 ore, in a building which allows productivity. Most suitably, the purifier. This is kind of rubbish as an option because it forces you to build extra infrastructure in the chain to get to your plates. But enriched, pellets has the same problem, and crushed would let you just skip the regular crushing recipe.
You could just buff the output to be more like 1 for 1 ore to plates and still allow productivity. In a furnace with 5 slots this would hold up until you put very very late game prod modules into the default chain. AND it would mean I could tack it on to my smelting array easily with a very simple circuit condition to divert the ore to just a furnace, skipping the 6 step default process.
