Thanks for the report, and the kind words!
Partly a bug, and partly an overly-conservative design choice. The bug was that with SE+K2, the bakelite requirements were based on wood and then getting doubled, and really should have just been 1 bakelite input per green circuit output. Additionally, I had made the energy requirement (i.e. time) for bakelite far too high. I've fixed the bug and reduced the time as well. Things should be FAR more reasonable in SE+K2, and slightly more reasonable in other mod loadouts.
Looking forward to zinc, nickel, precious metals, whatever else you have in the pipeline.
planetfall has created some mods for Nickel and Zinc which look great. I haven't had a chance to play a game with them yet, but they are probably worth checking out.
Also: I encourage you to include natural gas in the recipe/production chain for nitric acid and fertilizer in K2--would accurately reflect real-world use.
Per my understanding, the primary use of natural gas in fertilizer production chain is to produce hydrogen for ammonia. I currently have a recipe for natural gas reforming that covers the two steps (methane reforming + water-gas shift) for producing hydrogen from natural gas. Now, natural gas is also generally burned to drive this reaction, however that's harder to set up in Factorio for a single production chain.
